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Sunday, Sep. 13, 2009

The Lost Boys of Bibb

If you happen to be driving around the city during the day, you might catch sight of a school-aged black male child walking down the street. Generally he’s dressed in a white or black T-shirt and jeans sagging well below the belt line. Have you ever wondered who they are and why aren’t they in school, or do you just make sure your car door is locked? They are part of an ever-growing population: The Lost Boys of Bibb.

The Lost Boys of Bibb are in a more dire situation than the Lost Boys of Somalia. The Lost Boys of Bibb are morally bankrupt and uneducated, and here’s the big difference between the home-grown lost boys and their Somalian counterparts: Ours just don’t care.

We have, as the mayor mentioned Thursday at the march downtown to protest the killings of convenience store clerks, using a quote from Rev. Ronald Terry, “raised a generation of young people that is lawless, godless and fearless.”

Where do they come from? While they are the products of their environments, most brought up without fathers or other male figures worthy of emulating, much of their dive into failure starts at school.

We’ve known for decades that something happens, particularly to black boys, in the third grade. That leads to a statistic between the eighth and ninth grades that plagues the community when graduation statistics are computed.

For example, in March 2007, Bibb County schools had 1,868 students in the eighth-grade. Follow me now. In October, 2007, there were 2,232 ninth-graders, but by October, 2008, there were only 1,689 10th-graders, another 66 disappeared before March 2009.

The data tells us two things: One, most of the increase between the eighth and ninth grades is due to retention — ninthgrade children unable or unwilling to do the work being held back. Second is the drop in class size of 543 students between the ninth and 10th grades. Certainly, some moved away, but it’s my guess the system’s low graduation rate can be predicted by looking at this data set. It’s also my guess that it’s at this juncture where the Lost Boys of Bibb begin their solitary journeys into lives of unemployment, crime and social dysfunction.

Lost Boys can drop out of school when they reach 16. They can, in the words of Harry B. Thompson, former principal of Appling High School, legally, “knock about.”

Now, they are knocking people in the head and shooting up the city and filling our jails and prisons. What’s the solution? While every level of education is important, significant intervention on this population of students has to be implemented. Should it start as early as third-grade? Maybe. For sure it should start in middle school. Students who can’t pass muster in the eighth-grade should not be promoted to high school where the clock starts ticking on graduation rates.

This isn’t just an exercise to make the system’s graduation numbers look better. It is an exercise in saving the lives of children too young to understand the peril they face by entering the world dumb and stupid.

It’s possible a program could be implemented, such as the one proposed by Tony Lowden and Campus Clubs, that can help students behind a year catch up. Whatever the process, it needs to be implemented quickly. When a 13-year-old middle school student brings a loaded weapon to school, it’s only a matter of time before something god awful happens, such as a 16-year-old gunning down an innocent man in a convenience store parking lot or an 18-year-old killing in cold blood another clerk. And watch out, there are lost girls, too.

Charles E. Richardson is the Telegraph’s editorial page editor. He can be reached at 478-744-4342 or via e-mail at crichardson@macon.com.