Client: Shackleton School
Project/product: Casebook

The project
Behind the Boston-based Shackleton School lies the powerful vision of one individual: Luke O'Neill. O'Neill envisioned a high school for promising students who could not succeed in traditional high-school settings. He imagined a school (and ultimately a network of schools) that would help these young people succeed.

We worked with Luke to write a casebook for what he called "The Founders' Campaign." Having worked with some of the nation's oldest and most distinguished schools, it was invigorating to think and work at the other end of the spectrum -- at the beginning of a tradition.

Excerpt:
Two years ago, in the crowded waterfront city of Chelsea, Massachusetts, Jason Ware was in imminent danger of dropping out of high school. His teachers considered him bright, but Jason was distracted and uninterested. His difficult home life overshadowed his studies, which seemed increasingly irrelevant. "I decided I no longer needed to go to school," he says. "I felt I wasn't learning anything, and I could get more from a life on the streets."

Most of us know someone like Jason--a young man or woman who could easily slip into the nearly 4 million U.S. citizens between the ages of 16 and 24 who have no high school degree, and are not now enrolled in school. The sobering fact is that one student drops out of high school every eight seconds in the U.S. Across the nation, graduating high school classes are 30 percent smaller than the corresponding ninth grade classes of four years earlier. Somehow, our high schools are losing large numbers of students.

This has serious repercussions for our society. On the average, high-school dropouts earn less than $19,000 a year--not even half what a college graduate earns--and their earning power is declining. Dropouts are five times less likely to get jobs than high school graduates. According to the U.S. Army, by the year 2000, 25 million Americans won't have the skills necessary to earn a living.

Conversely, the benefits of education are enormous. Finishing high school adds an estimated $250,000 to a person's earning power. Going on to finish high college (according to the Wall Street Journal )adds another $600,000 or more. An investment in a Shackleton education, in other words, can help a young person open the door to a far better life. And from the standpoint of our nation's vitality and competitiveness, it has been estimated that improved literacy skills alone would save American businesses and taxpayers more than $20 billion annually.

Statistics have power. But at Shackleton, we know that the real work is done one young person at a time. We believe that young people like Jason can succeed in school and in life. In fact, we know it. But they need a special environment, one which offers experiences that traditional public and private schools cannot. At Shackleton, our young people learn by doing, by performing meaningful service, and by discovering their own unique talents.

With your help, we will develop and educational model that has the potential to change the way our nation approaches the dropout problem. At the same time, we will have a dramatic impact on students like Jason, on his family and his co-workers, and on all the people he lives and works with throughout his life.

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