American Graduate Week Kicks Off

This week, the PBS NewsHour will be featuring voices of and potential solutions to the high school dropout crisis. This comes on the heels of American Graduate Day, during which more than 20 national partners joined forces to provide compelling content about the faces and solutions behind the issue.

On Monday’s NewsHour, senior correspondent Ray Suarez will moderate a panel discussion featuring former dropouts. We’ll hear how they turned their lives around and what lessons can be learned from those experiences. Find more about them here.

On Tuesday, we’ll bring you a preview of FRONTLINE’s latest documentary, Dropout Nation. The piece airs Tuesday night on your local PBS station.

On Wednesday, join the producer and other key players from Dropout Nation here for a live online chat at 2 p.m. ET. Later, on the broadcast, we hear from the 2012 “Teacher of the Year” Rebecca Mieliwocki. Mieliwocki shares her secrets to success gleaned from 15 years in the classroom, and talks about what she wished she knew when starting out.

On Thursday, we premiere our special report ‘Educating a Boom.’ We examine how Williston, North Dakota is trying to educate the next generation and keep them in school while struggling to build enough classrooms and hire enough teachers and staff to keep up with an exploding population.

On Friday, we end the week with an encore presentation of our story about the power of student journalism out of St. Petersburg, Florida, and how it’s helping at-risk students stay in school. Thanks to a journalism mentorship program, De’Qonton Davis and his classmates report on the lingering effects of campus and neighborhood violence — and share how telling this story changed their own lives. Watch that here:

We also get an update from De’Qonton on his latest summer project.

Join the Conversation:

As we continue to report on the high school dropout crisis, we want to hear from you. Do you work with at-risk youth or know someone who has dropped out of school? What are some of the lessons learned from your experiences? What is missing in the national narrative to fight the high school dropout crisis?

Contribute your stories and thoughts in the comment section below.

American Graduate is a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to help local communities across America find solutions to address the dropout crisis.

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