Rotary Club works to keep kids in school

Rotary Club members visited parish schools in mid-May to present workshops in a program called CHOICES, which encourages students not to drop out.
Each workshop involves two interactive one-hour sessions. During the past three years, Rotarians have presented CHOICES workshops to eighth-grade students in Evangeline Parish. Since 2013, the workshops have reached almost 900 students at Mamou, Bayou Chicot, Chataignier, Ville Platte and Vidrine elementary schools.
The workshops came to Evangeline Parish and to Baton Rouge with a Rotary District grant. In Evangeline Parish, 150 students attended CHOICES workshops in the 2012-2013 school year, 362 students in 2013-2014 school year and 382 students this year.
Cabot Ville Platte Plant Manager Mark Suellentrop was president of the Ville Platte Rotary Club when CHOICES was brought to the parish in 2013. He said Rotary Club now funds half the operating costs of the program and Bank of America funds the other half.
He said the CHOICES program is particularly needed in this parish because it has a relatively large high school dropout rate. “There’s room to move up,” Suellentrop said. He also said educators here are seeing if the dropout rate is reduced after several consecutive years of CHOICES workshops. Students who were first to attend CHOICES workshops should be graduating high school in 2017.
The workshops were held during May this year, but Suellentrop said they will probably be offered in December during the next school year to avoid the heavy final testing schedule near the end of the school year.
The key lesson presented during the workshops is that the decisions the students make during their final years in school will impact them for the rest of their lives. Nationally, more than 7,000 high school students drop out every school day. Students learn during the workshops that students who drop out of high school face more problems in their lifetimes, and will each forfeit an estimated $260,000 in income during their working lives compared to high school graduates. At the same time, the general public -- high school graduates or not -- will face higher taxes to support additional health care and welfare costs and the higher costs involved with rising crime rates.
The students participate in “real-word exercises on academic self-discipline, time and money management and goal setting,” according to the CHOICES web site.
CHOICES was the inspiration of a Seattle, Washington, father whose son was having difficulties in school, according to the web site. What started as a series of letters the father wrote to his troubled son about the future consequences of certain decisions made today led to the formation of the national non-profit CHOICES Education Group in 1985.
The program has reached more than six million teens across the U.S. since then, and reaches more than 1,000 each school day. A 2007 study cited by CHOICES indicated that in schools where workshops have been given, there has been a nearly 10 percent increase in “appropriate engagement” in their schools and a decrease of nearly 10 percent in “inappropriate engagement” with their schools. CHOICES also cites a 2009 study of at-risk students who participated in the program, showing they increased their “school engagement” by nearly 50 percent.
And CHOICES seems to be well received at the schools where workshops have been presented. The CHOICES web site reports that 88 percent of students and 97 percent of teachers nationwide gave the program an “approval rating.”