It’s never too late to graduate, at least not from .
Each Monday through Friday until Aug. 4, volunteers in T-shirts sporting “Reclaim Your Future, It’s Not Too Late to Graduate” will visit designated areas of the city between the hours of 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.
The homes they visit will be homes of students who previously attended IPS but now are attending charter schools or have no record of a continued education after leaving IPS.
A charter school is a primary or secondary school that receives public and private money but is not subject to some of the rules, regulations and statutes that apply to other public schools.
IPS is currently experiencing a loss of almost 1,000 students per year.
“Our goal is to retain the students we have, because we can’t continue to lose students,” Dr. Jaquelyn Clency, assistant superintendent, said. “As far as reclaiming goes, there are so many children and young adults who have dropped out. We believe they’ll come back if they have a way to get back. We want to give them a step up to their future.”
The month-long initiative kicked off July 5, when the temperature hit 88 degrees. A group of eight volunteers took to the Eastside to reconnect with former IPS students. Equipped with packets of information explaining various programs, door hangers for when no one answers and plenty of water bottles, the group began its efforts.
Their goal is to educate children and families on their educational options in hopes that they will attend one of several registration fairs. The fairs will take place each Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. through Aug. 6 at several schools, including Arlington Community High School, Broad Ripple High School and Emmerich Manual High School. There, students who wish to join a program will meet with counselors and register.
James Majors Jr. was one of the residents that volunteers spoke with on the campaign’s first day. Majors has two children, a son and daughter who once attended IPS but now attend a charter school.
“IPS is too rough,” he said. “They were fighting every time I went to pick them up from school, so I pulled them out of Warren and John Marshall. I think they’re better off now; they have a better chance of going to college.”
Michael Elliott is the boys’ varsity basketball coach at Thomas Carr Howe High School and a “Reclaim Your Future” volunteer. He said that though charter schools can cater to individual needs, IPS has more programs to offer than charter schools. Information packets outline everything from summer programs to online courses and night classes. There are even options for adults.
“Families just don’t know about all of the opportunities,” he said. “They don’t know about the vocational opportunities, the virtual learning, the opportunities to get college credit.”
Though Elliott says that he deals with disciplinary issues at Howe, he said it’s not just a problem that Indianapolis Public Schools face.
“There are disciplinary issues in every school system,” he said. “Because we are so large, our disciplinary issues are magnified.”
By visiting with students at their homes, at community centers and on the streets and educating them on the many options IPS provides, Elliott believes that IPS will learn about what needs to be changed.
“Every school district needs at the end of every school year to evaluate what’s going great and what isn’t going so great,” he said. “Going out in the community gives us an opportunity to not only get kids back but also find out why they left. We can find out what we need to improve.”
