April 17, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The AT&T Foundation, in San Antonio, on Thursday plans to announce 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 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 drop-out 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 would 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.”
The foundation will support research by John Bridgeland, chief executive officer of Civic Enterprises, in Washington, and the author of the 2006 study “Silent Epidemic,” which surveyed high-school dropouts to figure out why they left school and what might have helped them stay. The new research will ask teachers, administrators, principals, and other school leaders about their perspective on the dropout problem in the United States.
Ms. Sanford said that beyond the money the foundation spends, it hopes its employees — from entry-level technicians to longtime executives, she said — will make a difference by serving as as mentors for 100,000 students, in grades 9 through 12, in a job-shadowing program. Junior Achievement, in Colorado Springs, will 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 first-hand about how an 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.
