From left, Ernest Davis and daughter Mya at Preston Place, Amy Reed and Frances O’Neal in the Darley Park garden, and youth leaders walking in Oliver - Photos by Chris Hartlove
Creating High Expectations
This school year, two city schools will work toward a safer, more learning-oriented environment with High Expectations, a youth intervention initiative created in spring 2008 by BUILD and Child First in response to escalating school violence. This year, the program will benefit students at Garrison Middle and Mergenthaler Vocational.
High Expectations seeks to provide safe environments by initiating and cultivating relationships with students, intervening to prevent violent incidents, and providing services and referrals to ensure students have the support they need to succeed in school.
From the 2007-08 to 2008-09 school years at Garrison Middle School, expulsions decreased from 21 to 5, long-term suspension from 26 to 4 and total suspensions from 147 to 44.
At the School for Homeland Security, a site last year, long-term suspensions
dropped from 71 to 9 and total suspensions from 318 to 100. No violent gang-related incidents were reported from January to June 2009.
Child First, created by BUILD in 1995 and now an independent organization, provides afterschool programs in 10 schools to more than 1,400 students.
Also in the news...
Bethany Baptist Church and Westport Academy
have joined with BUILD and Child First to
remedy problems in the school and neighborhood.
Their organizing efforts paid off when the
school building finally got reliable heat, something
they had lacked for more than a decade.
They organized to secure a full-time school
police officer, to launch the Child First afterschool
program, and to introduce High Expectations
to the school.
My father died when I was young and I did not have any positive male role models. Through the relationships that I have built with the men of High Expectations, I am learning what it is to become a man.
— Demonte Dupree,
Garrison Middle School
