If you are reading this right now, chances are you can thank a teacher. Of course, your parents most likely gave you your first literary exposure, but it is typically the elementary school teachers who see the spark light in a child’s eyes & run with it.I’m making another guess here, and supposing that if you’re reading this article you are an “educated” person, likely to have least finished high school. Maybe the road for you from kindergarten to 12th grade was paved in roses; everything came naturally to you, you had tons of friends and clear skin. You may have even been Prom Queen, the star quarterback, or the Drum Major for the marching band. On the other hand, you may have struggled in school, finding it hard to keep all those phonics rules inside your head. Maybe math seemed a big mystery that everyone understood – except you. Maybe you felt like an outsider & had few friends and couldn’t wait to get the heck out of there. You might have had it so bad that you even thought of dropping out. Seriously. I think we all considered it a time or two on the eve of our 16th birthdays; but for most, it was just a bit of fluff floating through the old noggin.Rising drop out rates in Orange County schools are a real problem, just like in the rest of this country. Orange County schools are hoping to do something about it.
So what are these kids doing if they’ve dropped out of Orange County schools? Maybe they haven’t officially taken the plunge, but have an awful lot of unexplained absences or disappearances after lunch. Chances are they’re hanging out with other kids from Orange County who’ve made the same decision. They might be at work, or they could just be staying home doing their best to avoid notice by imitating a potato. If I was into making bets, I’d bet that a whole lot of these Orange County schools’ kids are glued to a computer; surfing the web, checking e-mails, IM-ing (Instant Messaging), or updating their MySpace, YouTube, or Facebook pages.
Orange County schools are hoping to tap into this web surfing by posting pages on both YouTube and MySpace websites. They hope to catch the eyes of any dropouts from Orange County schools & entice them to really reconsider the decision they have made to quit school. Testimonials by former dropouts will be shown on YouTube in the hope that kids will see them and be inspired to at least consider heading back to the Orange County schools’ classrooms.
Orange County schools have made it a mission to reach out to these Orange County schools’ students, as inactive as they may currently be. By meeting them where “they live”, on websites such as those mentioned above, Orange County schools will be conveying the message that if a teen wants to return to school, or work on getting their diploma by alternate means, the Orange County schools are there to help.
