In the late 1990s, James Forman, Jr., then a public defender, saw many teenagers emerge from doing time in juvenile detention only to be turned away from the public schools they were trying to attend. The schools found myriad reasons to reject them as undesirable students. He and a fellow attorney tried various ways to help these kids get into school through the legal system but were unsatisfied with the results. They finally realized the best solution was to create a school just for these kids. Watch Forman talks about how they got started:
At first, the D.C. public schools alternative education office had no idea what to do with their idea. So Forman and his colleague, David Domenici, turned to the charter school route. In 1998, they opened the first Maya Angelou Public Charter School.
In the early years of the school, parents who were eager to enroll their students would ask Forman: “Are you saying that (my kids) have to be locked up to go to your school?” This sentiment prompted Maya Angelou to expand from educating only incarcerated teens to serving teens who were having trouble getting special education and other counseling attention in other schools. Watch Forman talk about how Maya Angelou expanded to serve a greater number of teens who needed help:
Today, there are three Maya Angelou schools, including a recently-constituted middle school, and a transition center for teenagers leaving the juvenile justice system. The schools provide mental health counseling, special tutoring and job preparation services, among other supports.
Below, Forman and the Middle School Principal Rashida Waters discuss the challenges and rewards of running schools for this neglected population. “It’s very easy for an individual teacher, or a group of teachers, or a school, or a system, or a society,” said Forman, “to give up on some kids.”
According to Forman, the entire public education system needs to focus more on serving kids who have multiple barriers, meaning kids who are leaving jail, have learning disabilities, or are teenage parents. Forman explains below why this is the only way to increase graduation rates in cities:
Track the dramatic expansion of charter schools across the U.S. and trace the major factors in this important trend, with our interactive map and timeline.
Reporting Education -- Through the Charter Lens
Since early 2009, the Columbia News21 team took notebooks, cameras and curiosities to places such as New Orleans, the Twin Cities, Newark, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., to explore the new marketplace of hybrid, public-private schools.
The result is this web site -- a deeply reported, richly multimedia and interactive web site, produced by a dozen Columbia journalism fellows, their editors and a group of new media producers.
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