Star Kids for the Children Left Behind

From a new interview/profile on the Ocean State Current; for the complete article visit the page:

Rhode Island is "leaving behind a remarkably high proportion of the population," Beacon Hill Institute Senior Economist Jonathan Haughton told the audience at a February 28 conference hosted by the RI Public Expenditures Council. "But those who make it through high school get on to college and do rather nicely."

Over the past decade, addressing the problems of the American education system has become the subject of national political debates and high-profile documentaries. During that same period, the Star Kids Program, based in Middletown, RI, has quietly gone about building a 100% graduation rate for the disadvantaged children of parents dealing with drug addiction and incarceration.

Star Kids works with private schools, charitable organizations, and individual sponsors to offer students guaranteed financial and community support from the time they enroll through their college application process. “We’ll never displace any child,” says Executive Director Kathleen Burke. The result has been that not a single one of the 148 students who have begun with the program and stayed within its geographical area has dropped out. That includes 12 who have graduated, all going on college (one trade school), with the most prestigious being Notre Dame and Georgetown.

The program began in 2000, when Dr. Timothy Flanigan --- head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Miriam Hospital, Rhode Island Hospital, and Brown University --- applied his experience cofounding Providence’s Rhode Islanders Sponsoring Education (RISE) program to the East Bay, from Newport to New Bedford. Often at the suggestion of social workers, families approach Star Kids, and the organization assists them through the process of choosing and applying to private, mostly religious schools.

In the plainest terms, what Star Kids offers to parents and other legal guardians is a choice of schools and a way out of a detrimental environment. In that regard, it can be seen as part of a larger trend, a movement, in education. According to Stephen Nardelli, Executive Director of the Rhode Island League of Charter Schools, the latest round of lotteries for the state’s 15 public charter schools, held last week, sifted through 6,521 applications to fill 697 openings. “It’s clear that there is a demand for public school choice,” he says.

“The real root is one child,” says Burke. “If you can make one child’s life better, if you can break into one generation of a family that’s been ’round and ’round with issues, then that’s going to help the educational system as a whole.”