Chicken, mashed potatoes and sweet tea weren’t the only things of interest for the capacity crowd Feb. 4 at the Parents for Public Schools Lunch Bunch meeting at the Jackson Medical Mall. On the agenda was a powerful concept that promises to stem the growing tide of Jackson’s high-school dropouts.
Here is the sobering statistic: In Jackson’s public schools, more than 36 of every 100 young scholars never made it to graduation day in 2011. Put another way, in a district where roughly 2,700 students start 9th grade each year, nearly 1,000 will drop out. Those dropouts may never become fully contributing, productive members of the community. Poverty or jail is a far more likely outcome.
Jackson isn’t alone with its abysmal graduation rates. At the end of the ’03-’04 school year, Nashville’s schools were even worse than Jackson’s, graduating only 58 percent of its kids. In a remarkable turnaround, by the end of the 2009-2010 year, the district had increased its graduation rate to 82 percent…