Out-of-school youth: much work lies ahead

To the editors:

I want to thank everyone at the Notebook for the broad and incisive coverage of Philadelphia's school dropout situation (Fall 2005 edition). You did an excellent job of introducing the issue in all its complexity and portraying how serious a problem it is, while also sharing the humanity of youth who end up labeled “dropout.”

Still, as one who has been working for many years to get public attention for this issue and to get public commitment to do something about it, I want to push you to do even more. The truth is that Philadelphia will need to make changes in how we think about our responsibility for youth in order to dedicate the resources needed to re-engage thousands of youth.

Yes, out-of-school youth are now “on the agenda,” but there are still very few opportunities available. All of us who work with this population receive calls from youth and their families – and many of these youth end up on waiting lists, not re-engaged.

The Philadelphia Youth Network and the Youth Transition Funders Group will support Philadelphia's efforts to design a system, but ongoing, long-term change will require a substantial commitment of local funding. The School District has recently opened several alternative schools that give dropouts an opportunity to enroll in rapid-credit-retrieval programs, but it was unable to fund a projected expansion of these schools this year.

As long as the needs of school dropouts are competing with the needs of youth who stay in school, it will be difficult to leverage sufficient resources. After all, it's hard to take away from youth who are ready to take advantage of opportunity.

While it's true we need more information about dropouts, we know that some models work, and we need to be consistently pushing for investment in these models – so that the current generation of out-of-school youth is not lost as we “build the system.”

Philadelphia needs to decide that allowing thousands of youth to drop out or be pushed aside is just not acceptable.

Taylor Frome
Executive Director
Youth Empowerment Services