Steve Dobo is a good candidate for sainthood. He gets high-school dropouts back into class.
A Denver Post series about finding former Manual High School students showed just how hard that is. The series, by reporter Allison Sherry and photographer Craig F. Walker, ends today. But questions it raises about the balance between public and private responsibility linger, especially as the Denver school board announces the fate of another troub led city school, North High.
The school board could choose to temporarily close North, as it did Manual. Or it could keep North open and shake up the school’s staff. In either case, Dobo’s experience tracking Manual dropouts exposes the X factor that public officials can’t control.
Denver Public Schools may commit to help its most vulnerable students. Until those students and their families help themselves, the odds of turning around the likes of Manual and North are long. Children who have babies before they graduate and parents who let children take jobs that force kids to leave school make personal choices that doom reform.
Dobo has a saying: “You don’t want to work harder than the person you’re trying to help.”
It’s time for those needing the most help to step up. The series, among others, profiled a 15-year-old with a 6-month-old baby. The series also examined the life of a 17-year-old working the graveyard shift at a laundry. These aren’t just isolated cases in Denver’s school-dropout community. They are archetypes.
Archetypes of self-destruction.
Dobo still thinks he can break through.
“One of the things I see in these families is a desire to make it in society,” Dobo said. “But there are so many barriers. The first thing you have to do is restore hope.”
But people must also change how they act.
“Statistics show that kids who drop out of school to take jobs make more money in the short term than those who stay in,” said University of Colorado education professor Margaret LeCompte. Over the long haul, LeCompte quickly added, such thinking ensures failure.
Too often, the folks who are bound to fail don’t make the distinction.
Dobo, LeCompte and Trish McNeil believe they can.
McNeil directed DPS’s Commission on Secondary School Reform. She talks of the school system’s “accountability for kids reading, writing and computing in early grades” so they are not “passed along to high school” without basic skills.
Public accountability works until you see kids who choose to skip class, who choose to have unprotected sex, whose parents pay lip service to education but rely on their kids’ income to pay bills.
Dobo says he gets about 50 percent of the dropouts he works with back in school. For him, that makes the glass half full. But in a system such as Denver’s, where the dropout rate runs to 50 percent, the numbers left on the street remain staggering.
The Post series detailed how Dobo and a colleague sometimes place school wake-up calls to teens who work until the wee hours. Sometimes, Dobo and company drive kids to school.
“When you have to wake someone up and drive them to school, someone has to take responsibility,” said Van Schoales, a children’s advocate from The Piton Foundation. “Basically, the consequences are not seen by the kids or their families until it is too late.”
At best, high-school dropouts get sentenced to life in an economic underclass, Schoales said. At worst, they get sentenced to life in a penitentiary.
LeCompte takes that to mean: “You pay taxes now for schools, or you pay taxes later for prisons.”
It can also mean: You hold yourself accountable now, or society holds you accountable later.
Maybe students at failing schools are better off if the board of education temporarily closes their schools. Maybe they’re better off if the board revamps their schools but keeps them open.
What gets clearer and clearer is this:
However a school system acts, individual behavior determines success.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
