American Graduate; Robert F. Kennedy Charter High School

Robert Bady RFK handles at risk students, students who may not have necessarily dropped out yet, but they're at risk of dropping out. They're close to it. They certainly don't all have the same problem. How do you find a solution that works for all these different students? So you need to meet the student where they're at. So we don't really think there's an average student, right? An average is after you look from far away. Each individual student is an individual person and those needs need to be addressed for that individual student. So some students come in for grade levels behind, other students come in at grade level. But they come for some reason. And that reason needs to be supported. And so it could be

social economics, could be transportation, could be the need for a small family-oriented school, could be the need for small classrooms. So students come for different reasons. And an individual learning plan needs to be developed for that student. And you said when you first get these students, you welcome them into the school and they have to go through sort of an introductory period and then they get into your upper team. Your graduation rate there, 80%, maybe a little bit above, that's not all. It's better than a national average. What does it feel like when you get someone into that upper group and you still can't keep them in? It's frustrating, but the door swings back open at RFK. And so I can remember two years ago, a student by the name of Joey, when he graduated, he had a full beard. And he was speaking at graduation and he says, Robert, I've been your student for 10 years. So for that student, they've been in and out, in and out. They've been incarcerated. They've

been in rehab. But we never quit on the student. When they came back out, they were ready to come back to school. We were there. So a long term approach, this is a marathon, not a dash. So we've had grandmothers come back to school and graduate because their granddaughters said, we don't need to finish because you didn't finish. So when the grandmother finished the following year, her granddaughters went and got their GED. And so you can't look in the short term, you need to look in the long term and you did not quit on young people or students in general. Once they walk out the door, they're free to walk back in. They're always welcome to come back in. There are things that can get you removed. If you have a fight at Robert F. Kennedy, you're out for nine weeks. You have to do six sessions with the social worker on the violence intervention. You write an essay and come back and read it to the staff and petition for reinstatement. Half the students choose not to do that. They don't come back, right? The half that do, don't have another fighter at RFK.

We've spoken to a number of RFK students, particularly on shows like Public Square, for example. We followed them to the city council meeting just this past week and we got some video of that. One of the issues that sort of caught us off guard a little bit was the fact that bus fare for many of them is an issue with that video. Ever since he actually helped me get a bus pass last month, my grades and my attendants have went up in a considerably large amount and currently there is now 32 students that are having the same trouble that I'm having to get to school on time. Today I came here to ask you if you guys would please give us the drop-out prevention grant because I believe that kids can't actually graduate unless they get that one little tiny push. Thank you. Thank you for being here and I had the opportunity to do a lot. I feel great. I've wanted to bring this situation up for so long and now that I've actually brought it up, I really think that I can actually get bus passes back for our school again. We heard Nick say a couple of weeks ago that something like 35 cents makes a big difference.

These kind of issues that most people out in the community don't think about when they think about why kids drop out. Well I don't know what the people in the community think but it's certainly a reason why students don't get to school and if a student doesn't get to school, at some point they're not going to be in a credit, they're going to become discouraged and they're going to drop out. And so for some families, transportation is the issue. We've had families that have had to sell one of their automobiles in order to make mortgage payments. All of a sudden how the family is going to use the remaining vehicle makes it difficult for students to get to school. Nick's right, we used to have a drop-out grant from the city and we used most of that drop-out grant to pay for city bus passes for our students. We had to have an 8, maintain an 80% attendance in order to get the bus pass the next month. But well Nick had that bus pass, he was at school every day. And so for a young person to now go and advocate for the bus pass, we need the bus pass, not

the drop-out grant at this point. Because there are a number of students who have a difficult time getting to school. We cannot do to and from transportation at RFK. We need to go through the district and it's not a viable approach. City transportation is the viable approach for the students at RFK. And many other public schools. You have students who are openly talking about drug issues. You have classes like ceramics. Why a class like ceramics? There's going to be a reason to stay at RFK. If you've come to RFK and you're four grade levels behind in math and four grade levels behind in reading, you may need to take two math classes a day. You may need to take a reading in a language arts class. There may not be any fun in that. I'm having a ceramics class to do during the orientation process to know that you could take that ceramics class the entire time you're at RFK.

It's an honor to be in the class, but it's a reason to do well. Meet the student where they're at. And if that's something that they really do want to be engaged about, to keep it in front of them, to keep them encouraged, to keep them coming back. Hello? What's up? Look up. I mean, you also have a daycare center on campus, something that probably like a bus pass makes it a lot easier for kids who have kids to stay in school. So it's a child development center. That's just the daycare, because the parents are involved in parenting classes. The student parents are involved in parenting classes. And so for some students, it's the reason they can come back to school. For some students who get pregnant while they're in school, that's a way they can stay in school. That's a great example of a public-private partnership. That's a natural private child development center that we utilize on our campus.

But it provides support for a 10th of a population, a 10th of a population of parents, and they would not be in school. We're at not for that child development center. That's absolutely true. Robert Bady, we knew this time would feel too short and it sure does, but thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate the opportunity.