“Stay out of jail!” That was the subject line of an email I received shortly after I started in my new role as CEO at Achieve3000.
The sender was one of our implementation managers, who wrote me about his experience bumping into a student at his district’s juvenile court school. “As we got near each other, the young man literally grabbed and hugged me,” my colleague reported. The student said, “This is the LAST time I will walk out of jail because I am a better reader now and more college ready. I’ll never be back in a place like this again, because I’m closer to being ready for a job as a border patrol officer.” My colleague finished his email to me with this: “What we do MATTERS!”
I’ve spent 16 years serving on and chairing the board of the National Dropout Prevention Center (NDPC) and 25 years leading companies that serve schools and students of all kinds. Throughout, I’ve often found myself thinking about students like this one, who ended up in juvenile detention by ninth grade. Or about the ones who act out in class because they’re embarrassed that they can’t read; they’d rather get in trouble than lose face. Or the ones who are so far behind that catching up seems hopeless. Or who stop showing up at school altogether.
I pay close attention to classroom solutions that can meet these students exactly where they are. After visiting literally hundreds of schools and talking with thousands of K-12 educators, students, and parents over two and a half decades, I know that it’s crucial that we strive to connect all students to learning regardless of their needs or levels of readiness.