Denzel Washington, Ron Howard launch boys and girls club PSA, talk high school dropout rate

Teni Sow | September 24, 2011 | 0 Comments

Academy Award-winning film director Ron Howard, basketball star LeBron James, musical artist Ashanti and Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington were in Washington, D.C. Wednesday to relay their message to at-risk youth: the importance of school. This is part of a national movement to bring awareness to the issue through high-profile celebrity attention.

In the first of an 18-month PBS series on America’s high school dropouts, PBS NewsHour’s Gwen Ifilltalked to Washington about his work with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

“Fundamentally, we are failing our kids,” Washington says. “It is not their fault. It is the — if there is fault to be — it’s the fault of the adults.”

The actor discusses the club’s work to keep kids in school, but emphasizes that parents are a critical part of emphasizing education and high school graduation.

“I mean, fundamentally, it’s parenting,” Washington tells Ifill. ” My mother said that your biggest influence your children will be in their first five years, because, in those days, it was five years, because once you went to kindergarten, once you started going to school, you were influenced by others. So it starts in the home.”

The gathering comes with the launch of a new Boys And Girls Club public service announcement, “Great Futures Start Here,” directed by Howard, that addresses childhood obesity and youth violence in addition to the high school dropout rate.

Of the 3.8 million students that started high school this year, a quarter won’t receive a diploma. According to an NPR series that aired this summer, high school dropouts cost taxpayers between $320 billion and $350 billion a year in lost wages, taxable income, health, welfare and incarceration costs, among others.

Dropouts are not eligible for 90 percent of the jobs in our economy, and a student drops out of high school every 26 seconds in the U.S., contributing to a rising unemployment rate.Those who don’t carry high school diplomas will also earn $200,000 less over their lifetime than those who do.

Make Current

RedditStumbleUponDeliciousTumblrDiggBlogger PostMister-WongLinkedInShare

Related posts:

  1. Report:LA County High School Drop Out Rate
  2. Teen Girls Drinking More Known from Survey: Girls “Self-Medicate” with Booze, Drugs
  3. Fight club from colorado high schools hitting you tube
  4. Expert Says: At Oak Park-River Forest High School Sex Ranking List Of Girls Not Criminal
  5. San Clemente high school bomb threat: school evacuated after note claims explosives planted

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Category: Education

Comments (0)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

There are no comments yet. Why not be the first to speak your mind.

Leave a Reply

«
»
Increase your website traffic with Attracta.com