Hezekiah Louis dreams of being employed, owning a house and raising a family. But first, the rising seventh-grader has to get through middle and high school.
Louis, a student at Atlanta's Crawford Long Middle School, is taking part in a summer program aimed at helping him reach that goal. Atlanta police officers and educators teamed up to host the program, which is for youths who have had school attendance issues.
Part camp and part school, the two-week program is giving students lessons in topics as varied as sex education and anger management. Students also take field trips to Georgia landmarks and receive a behind-the-curtains look at the Police Department.
“We want the students to understand that you stay in school to get an education, and you get an education to have a good life," said Officer Otis Redmond.
Truancy, or skipping school, is a major problem in Atlanta, Officer Michelle Wright said. In west Atlanta, she and her fellow officers catch more than 400 truant students per school year.
This year, truancy officers suggested dealing with the problem early by hosting an anti-truancy summer program. Many studies have said truancy is an early indicator that kids may next drop out of school. Georgia's high school graduation rate for 2011 was 67.4 percent.
Businesses provided donations to back the program, and Atlanta Public Schools selected the “students [it] thought would benefit,” Redmond said.
Most of those students were chosen based on a spotty school attendance record, but others joined the program to have fun. The first group of 15 students took part last month. A new group of 26 students between the ages of 12 and 14 began the program June 18.
Simply attending the program is meant to be a lesson in timeliness.
“We have to get up and be ready to go,” said Tasia Jackson, a rising seventh-grade student at Crawford Long Middle School. Jackson rises as early as 6 a.m. to be ready for pickup by an APD van at 7 a.m. Class at Kennedy Middle School begins at 8:30 a.m.
Timeliness is just one issue officers hope to address. Classes cover various topics, including health, bullying, puberty, and communication skills.
Students also take daily field trips. On Tuesday, they visited the APD's Mounted Patrol headquarters, where officers keep and train horses used for crowd control.
As students gathered around a horse pen, Officer Erickie Godfrey demonstrated training techniques with a police horse named Dakota. Students watched, and occasionally joined in, as Godfrey gave the horse directions.
“Just like you’re told to go home, do math and read, he’s supposed to follow orders,” Godfrey told the students.
Godfrey later said that he hopes the training session reminded students that “if they do it right the first time, they won’t have to work as hard to get it done later.”
Redmond said the officers also hope "this shows kids the police do a lot of stuff other than lock people up.”
“There was tension with the last group,” Officer Adriane Warner said about relations between students and the police. “But by the end, we saw a big difference. They better understood what the police actually do.”
Most of the students sounded a positive note about the program.
"We're learning stuff we haven't learned in school," said Khali Williams, an eighth-grade student at Sylvan Hills Middle School. "We're learning how to stay out of trouble."
Tavarus King, who plans to enter a charter high school in the fall, said he will attend school regularly and on time from now on.
“Skippers think school is lame," he said, "but you need school to achieve in life.”
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