Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Thursday, September 21, 2006
A promise: Kids will get to college
(Heather Roth of Kalamazoo, Mich.)
Suppose you could magically give every kid who lives in the city of Dayton the means to go to college. Would that really motivate people, especially upwardly mobile middle class families, to move into the city?
We may get the chance to find out.
Back in the summer I wrote about a local group that had this dream of making college possible for Dayton kids and at the same time providing an economic boost to the city.
They’re no longer dreaming. Now they’re serious about doing it.
In today’s paper the anti-sprawl group, Grassroots Greater Dayton, acknowledged they have a program ready to go and they hope to start fund-raising in November with the goal of offering scholarships to kids in 2008.
The program is modeled after the Kalamazoo Promise, a similar effort that’s about a year old in Michigan that offers full scholarships to any Michigan college to kids who graduate after 13 years in the city’s public schools.
Dayton’s proposal is different in interesting ways. I’m working on a follow up story that will look at how things are going in Kalamazoo and how these differences might affect the Dayton program. Among them:
—The scholarships are limited. Kalamazoo offers full rides to any state school. Dayton would offer $5,000 a year for four years. This is probably a function of fiscal realities here.
—Private and charter eligibility. In Dayton, all kids living in the school district would be eligible for up to $20,000 in scholarships, not just kids attending the school district. Why? I’m guessing it may have to do with who might fund the program. Some education minded individuals and foundations locally have pet interests outside of the school district, like the Mathile Foundation (Catholic schools) and the Fordham Foundation (charter schools).
—Only local colleges are included. Kids could take their scholarship money to these 10 schools: Sinclair Community College, Central State University, Wright State University, Clark State Community College, Edison Community College, University of Dayton, Wilberforce University, Wittenberg University, Antioch University, Kettering College of Medical Arts.
On the surface, the logic of this move is easy to see. It keeps smart local kids in the community and bolsters local colleges. But I think Kalamazoo’s program — with free tuition to any state school, including excellent schools like Michigan and Michigan State — is more attractive and more likely to bring out of the area families to Kalamazoo (a Realtor group there says it has gotten calls about the program from every state).
An argument could be made that this limits the program if students can’t use it to attend some of the state’s best schools, like Ohio State and Miami University.
Would the Dayton Promise, as proposed, be enough to move your family into the city of Dayton?
(Image credit: Ed Roth)
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