High School dropouts pay a big price

BY BAO VANG

Football was Terrell Washington’s escape from real life. The smell of nicely-cut green grass made him forget that his mom smoked crack cocaine. The feel of the pigskin was a reliable escape from a fatherless childhood. And the sight of his teammates bonding gave him hope that they would graduate from high school together.

The nearly 6-foot-tall African-American linebacker tackled the roughest kids for Roosevelt High School and the next year for North High. Washington transferred back to Roosevelt as a junior, but couldn’t nail the C average needed to play. When football was taken from him, nothing else mattered. He lacked motivation to get up for school, didn’t pay attention in classes and pretty soon, stopped going all together. No one from his home encouraged him to go back. In fact, he was needed at home to help with three younger siblings.

“My mom left us,” said Washington. “She was out getting high.” While mom was fueling her crack addiction, his uncles found themselves in and out of jail, and one aunt was stabbed outside a Minneapolis nightclub and later died. The only stable adult in the family was his maternal grandmother. Washington’s grandmother received custody of his deceased aunt’s two young children. By 1997, when Washington’s mom entered a drug rehabilitation center, his grandmother added Washington and his siblings to her household.

For the past two years, 19-year-old Washington has been helping out at his grandmother’s place. And there are a lot of kids at Washington’s house, too. Every day, a half dozen children from the neighborhood use his grandmother’s day care service. Washington wakes up before 6 a.m. each morning to help his grandmother, a former teacher, prepare for the day. His main job is to make sure the children “stay out of trouble.” On the weekends, he plays street football. He’s unemployed and too ashamed to go back and get his G.E.D.

Increasingly, Minnesota business leaders recognize that the failure of young people like Washington to finish high school is a problem for the whole state. With four-year graduation rates of less than 50 percent for minorities, the state isn’t producing enough skilled workers. According to a Brookings Institution research report, “Mind the Gap,” disparities between whites and minorities are significant. If the education gap between these larger groups isn’t closed, the state’s economy will pay a high price.

Researchers for the Brookings Institution worked closely with The Itasca Project, a collaboration of more than 40 area chief executive officers, mayors and university leaders. Mary Brainerd is the president and CEO of Health Partners, and the chair of the Itasca Project’s Socio-economic Disparities Taskforce. Brainerd said recently that the changing demographic has a direct effect on the future of her company.

“It’s very clear to me, the connection between this work and the future of my own organization, and I know that other business leaders are looking at it the same way,” said Brainerd.

If Minnesota does not recognize that it is educating less qualified workers than the previous generation, it will be hard to fill positions baby boomers leave behind. She gave the healthcare industry as one example.

“We had a shortage a few years ago of nurses,” she said. “We know that the average age of a nurse is about 45 years old. And we know that it’s not very many years down the road and we’re going to be experiencing shortages again, unless we can make those professions attractive. But also we need to have people who are educated to fill those roles.”

As Minnesota continues to grow more diverse, gaps between whites and minorities must be closed, she said. “Closing the gap on race, income level and place disparities is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do,” said Brainerd.

The number of low-income and students of color is rising in public schools, but less than one half of them graduate from high school on time, stated the Brookings report. Only 41 percent of the state’s Native Americans and 43 percent of black students graduate from high school within four years, less than half of the 87 percent rate of white students.

The reasons for dropping out vary.
As a freshman, Nang Pich was on the B-honor roll at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. He liked school, got good grades and had many friends. Four months later, he dropped out.

“It was in my 10th grade year that I started fucking up,” said Pich.
Early in his sophomore year, Pich was ditching school to find those “Mexicans that think they’re better than us.” Pich and his clique of Cambodian friends at Roosevelt had had a rivalry with a group of Mexicans since middle school. When the two groups found each other, it was likely that at least one person ended up hurt, beat up or bleeding.

Pich is tough and rough around his friends. But by himself, he’s a shy man of 20 wearing small rectangular glasses.

Dropping out was easy for Pich. His immigrant mother does not speak English and does not work. She stays at home and lives off Social Security. His father was dying of lung cancer. Three of his younger siblings followed Pich’s lead and have dropped out. Only the youngest child, an 11-year-old sister who is living in a foster home, is in school. Pich has never held a job, doesn’t have a driver’s license and relies on his friends to go out. He thinks about going back to school but says, “I have to have my fun first.”

Stories like Washington’s and Pich’s worry Jennifer Ford Reedy, coordinator of the Itasca Task Force and CEO of McKinsey & Company’s Minneapolis office. “It is becoming much more obvious that we have some very troubling race-based disparities. And if we don’t address those disparities, then it is very easy to see the Twin Cities trend downward in every socio-economic indicator.”

The Itasca group wants first to inform the larger community that the demographic gap exists and is troubling. “We need to share the information from the “Mind the Gap” report with as many people as possible. We have a speaker’s bureau set up through the United Way and have long surpassed our goal of reaching at least 5,000 people,” said Brainerd.

To close the racial gap, Brainerd suggests that businesses can reach out to lower-income employees and help them access community resources and learn about programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Businesses can also partner with job training programs, and create internship opportunities for low income youth and young adults. In addition, enhancing education, health care and public safety to meet the needs of the population is essential.

In his own way, Terrell Washington is already doing that. Each morning, he makes sure his 17-year-old brother wakes up for school. In the evening, he cooks Hamburger Helper for dinner and helps his 3-year-old sister sing the ABCs.

Soon he plans to start work on his G.E.D. He’d like to show his family that it’s never too late.