DURHAM -- Durham Public Schools will get $1.25 million over five years to further close the achievement gap between African-American male students and their peers.
The grant money, given by the NEA Foundation, will be used for the Redefining Futures for African-American Males Initiative, aimed to enhance black male student achievement within the district's most challenging schools. The effort will help students move between grade levels, support teaching endeavors that increase African-American learning and increase parental and community involvement.
The effort also will include counselors working with families in their homes, something that Gov. Beverly Perdue said is needed for academic achievement.
“It's that whole child that comes to school in the morning; he doesn’t leave what happens at home when they walk through that door," she said during an announcement of the grant today at Lowe's Grove Middle School. "And everybody has to have someone who steps up for them. And you decided that it's going to be Durham.”
The initiative will be instituted in two sets of schools that feed into one other: Eno Valley Elementary, Chewning Middle and Northern High and Fayetteville Street, Lowe's Grove Middle and Hillside High.
Only 33 percent of black students scored proficient English and reading test scores in the latest round of tests, compared with 62 percent of white students, according to DPS numbers. In math, 35 percent of blacks scored proficiently, compared 66 percent of whites. When it comes to graduation rates, almost 45 percent of black males do not finish in four years, compared with 13 percent for whites.
School officials are inspired by the grant's results in Milwaukee, Seattle and Chattanooga, Tenn., and are looking forward to similar change in Durham, said Minnie Forte-Brown, Durham school board chairwoman. For the black male students who finish high school, too many of them are ill-prepared for college, she said.
"African-American males, the buds of promise that we hold in our hands, are depending on us to deliver on America's promise, a quality education for all," she said.
