This past Sunday, my church used the morning service to celebrate our high school and college graduates. The young people came forward in their caps and gowns and were recognized, along with the family members who had supported them and encouraged them along the way. It was a wonderful time. Spring is graduation season, and in the coming weeks there will be many ceremonies and parties across the country. It’s right that we celebrate our graduates and not take their accomplishments for granted.
Since retiring from the NFL, I’ve started to do more work with middle school and high school programs. I’ve learned that all over the country, graduation rates are down and dropout rates are up. In 2008, Colin Powell did a study for President Bush and found that more than one million teens drop out of school every year. That’s about one every 29 seconds. In our 50 largest cities the dropout rate is around 48 percent, meaning almost half of the students who enter ninth grade will not graduate from high school. These dropouts will earn an average of $9,200 a year less than high school graduates and, over the course of their lifetime, over $1,000,000 less than the average college graduate. So there’s an obvious financial incentive to finish high school; but the statistic that’s even more frightening to me is the one linking dropouts to trouble with the law. The Stanford Center for Education Research says that boys who don’t get their high school diplomas are 3.5 times more likely to be incarcerated at some point in their lives than high school graduates. I know in Florida the state is planning future prisons based on the number of high school dropouts we have now.
All these stats point to the need for our young people to do well in school and get as much education as possible. The thing I’m finding out as I travel and speak to students is that we can’t wait until high school to get that message across-many times it’s too late by then. Attitudes about school develop early, so as parents, getting our kids off to a good educational start is critical. And we dads can’t leave it all up to the moms. As men, we’ve got to read more with our kids, stay involved with their schools and help them look at learning as fun. I know I have not done as good a job in this area as I need to. But I have three young children, so that’s something I’m really going to concentrate on. It’s important that we start them off right and give them a chance to succeed in school. We want to keep those graduation parties coming.
