• Home
  • News
    • Politics & Government
    • Business & Economy
    • Crime / Courts
    • Health / Medicine
  • Sports
    • High School Sports
    • Radio Iowa Poll
  • Affiliates
    • Affiliate Support Page
  • Contact Us
    • Reporters

Radio Iowa

Iowa's Radio News Network

You are here: Home / Education / Volunteers look to get drop outs back into school

Volunteers look to get drop outs back into school

September 23, 2011 By Matt Kelley

About 7,900 Iowa students drop out of high school every year and an effort is underway this weekend to lure some of them back to school. Shirley Burgess, with the United Way of Central Iowa, says 200 volunteers and about 70 school officials will be visiting some 400 former students in the region who’ve dropped out in the past year.

Burgess says, “Teams of three or four will be going around working from a list of identified students and knocking on their door and asking to have a conversation about how we might help them find their path back to school that day.” Saturday will mark the third annual “Reach Out to Dropouts” event.

Over the past two years, Reach Out to Dropouts volunteers visited a total of 862 young people, encouraging 37 to return to school and re-enroll. Another 89 made appointments to re-enroll. “Kids leave school for two reasons,” Burgess says.

“There’s things that push them out and there’s things that pull them out. Maybe there was a bad experience at school that pushed them out. Maybe they’ve had to get a job to help support their family and that’s what’s pulling them out.” Burgess says studies find that dropouts have lower job prospects and income potential along with a higher incidence of incarceration and teen pregnancy than their peers who finish school.

“We know what happens to a person who does not get their high school diploma,” Burgess says. “On average, over their lifetime, they earn about a million dollars less. There’s increased health care because sometimes they don’t even have the health care that they need to stay healthy.”

She says the strategies are starting to work. In the Des Moines metro area, the number of dropouts has fallen fallen from 710 in the 2007-08 school year to 623 in 2009-10. The goal is to cut by half the number of high school students who do not graduate on time by 2020.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Filed Under: Education

Featured Stories

All bodies of missing now recovered from rubble of collapsed Davenport building

Governor signs child care expansion into law

Iowa seniors have until July 1 to apply for new property tax break

Smoke from distant fires creates colorful sunrise in Iowa

DOT’s Motor Vehicle Enforcement Division to merge into State Patrol

TwitterFacebook
Tweets by RadioIowa

What may be rare Michael Jordan trading card found in unclaimed deposit box

Hawkeye women to play Virginia Tech

Radio Iowa/Baseball Coaches Association High School Poll 6/5/23

Iowa eliminated at NCAA regional

Iowa names Beth Goetz interim AD

More Sports

Archives

Copyright © 2023 ยท Learfield News & Ag, LLC