May 1, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The AT&T Foundation, in San Antonio, has announced a $100-million grant-making program that seeks to keep students in school and prepare them for college or a career.
Over four years, the foundation will make grants to hundreds of schools and nonprofit groups, sponsor research on high-school dropouts, engage its employees as mentors, and hold 100 community meetings — one in every state and one in each of the 50 largest American cities — to raise awareness of the nation’s dropout problem and devise solutions to stem the trend.
America’s Promise Alliance, a Washington-based network of charities, companies, foundations, legislators, and religious groups that works for children and youths, will receive $500,000 to lead those meetings. The organization says that more than 1.1 million students drop out of school each year and that half the students in the largest American cities are not graduating from high school.
Marguerite Kondracke, president of America’s Promise Alliance, said the dropout rate is a trend that threatens American competitiveness in the international market.
“It’s not only a moral crisis, it’s an economic crisis,” she said.
The AT&T Foundation has long concentrated its philanthropy on education, but Laura Sanford, the fund’s president, said that by focusing on a specific aspect of the problems facing schools, it hopes its grant making will be more effective.
“Grants that we’re giving out in this program are larger amounts” than grants in previous years, she said. “We want to achieve issue impact.”
Research Effort
A grant of $267,000 from the foundation will support research by John Bridgeland, chief executive officer of Civic Enterprises, in Washington. He is the author of the 2006 study “The Silent Epidemic,” which surveyed high-school dropouts to figure out why they had left school and what might have helped them stay.
The new research will ask teachers, administrators, principals, and other school leaders about their perspectives on the dropout problem in the United States.
The AT&T Foundation has also allocated $500,000 to Jobs for America’s Graduates, in Alexandria, Va., for program development.
Ms. Sanford said that beyond the money the foundation spends, it hopes its employees — at all levels, including entry-level technicians and longtime executives, she said — will make a difference by serving as mentors for 100,000 students in grades 9 through 12 in a job-shadowing program. Junior Achievement, in Colorado Springs, will receive a five-year grant of $5.5-million to help the foundation administer the effort.
Students often can’t see the connection between the work they do in school and their future careers, Ms. Sanford said, and learning firsthand about how education relates to potential jobs in technology may help bridge that gap.
“What we found is that dropouts themselves identified that the curriculum that is presented to them was not relevant to practical application in life,” she said.
