Dropping Out: Why students leave Decatur schools, Decatur, IL 2001
Partners:
Herald & Review
WILL-TV (PBS)
WILL-AM
“Dropping Out: Why students leave Decatur schools” was a civic journalism project that involved citizens, including those who’d never finished high school, in developing ideas to help keep students in school through graduation.
In November 2001, the partners commissioned a survey of 102 adults who had dropped out of Decatur public schools in the previous 40 years. For many of the respondents, it was the first time they had ever been asked why they’d left. Their answers pointed to some concrete steps for retention programs. One-third said additional help from a teacher or administrator might have kept them in school. Another third said more interesting classes would have helped.
The Herald & Review reported the results in a three-part series that kicked off on Jan. 27, 2002. Radio reports began on WILL-AM on Jan. 28. The reporting project coincided with the creation of the Decatur Joint Dropout Task Force, a community coalition focused on providing at-risk youth with support to stay in school. Task force members were invited to participate, along with school officials, in a March 21 town meeting on the drop-out problem, co-sponsored by the paper and the local NAACP chapter. Nearly 200 people attended and so many lined up to ask questions the scheduled 90-minute meeting lasted for more than two hours. The paper also identified community members to take part in a live call-in show broadcast April 17 from WILL-TV’s studio in Urbana.
The partners chartered a bus to take the participants, citizens and school officials from Decatur to Urbana on the night of the broadcast. The ride itself proved to be an important part of the project, as it became a brainstorming session for possible solutions.
One element of the project that turned out to be less successful than hoped was a program to open banks of computers on weekends for drop-outs to fill out a brief survey and be connected with community resources for job training and GED classes. The partners publicized the program through the paper and fliers delivered to several social service agencies. The program operated for only two weekends and was abandoned when, after four days, only nine people had participated. Overall, though, the partners considered the project a success, with school officials and the Task Force developing innovative ideas to tackle the drop-out problem with input from the survey, town hall and live broadcast.
Contact:
Jan Touney
Associate Editor
Herald & Review
601 E. Williams Street
Decatur, IL 62525
Phone: (217) 421-6973
Email: jtouney@herald-review.com