The DeKalb County Children’s Service Council and their Youth Council were invited to attend the 2009 Moving Forward Graduation Summit, held in Nashville on March 18th at the Nashville Convention Center.
Those attending from the Children’s Service Council were: Vonda Brown, Wanda Redmon, Grady Prichard, Clata Redmon, and the Youth Council were: Halea Brown, Dustin Brown, Jessica Goldstein, and Katie Stutts. The only other representative from DeKalb County was high school Principal Kathy Hendrix.
The representatives from DeKalb County were the only group given the opportunity to meet Gov. Phil Bredesen and have their picture made with him.
There were ten school districts invited to this summit from across the state which included DeKalb County. The goal of this statewide summit was to serve as a starting point for the process of planning local summits and implementing dropout prevention strategies that will increase graduation rates in each district. After informational sessions in the morning and a lunch keynote address from Governor Phil Bredesen, each of the ten invited school districts met separately in breakout sessions to begin discussions on the next steps and talk about how to take the information back home to implement local dropout prevention plans.
There are several grants available for DeKalb County to try to find a solution for dropout prevention. There is a $1000.00 grant to each of the ten counties represented to help with a local summit. They were encouraging that the local summit include members from the local community, such as: local organizations, businesses, industries, school system, and parents.
The youth that attended the summit agreed that it was an enlightening experience to see how problems are solved from the state down to the local level. They were very appreciative for the opportunity to be invited and attend this summit as representatives for DeKalb County.
The Children’s Service Council hopes that our local school system will work with organizations, businesses, industries, parents, and any interested individuals to form a team to come up with some prevention strategies to help with the high school dropout problem here in DeKalb County.
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