Nevada School District Considers Creating Campus for At-Risk Students
A Nevada County school district is exploring the possibility of opening a campus aimed at serving at-risk youth. A Dec. 7 article by Michael Martinez of the Reno Gazette-Journal reported on the effort by the Washoe County School District :
The Sierra Tahoe Center for Arts and Technology would be based on a model developed by Pittsburgh-based author and motivational speaker Bill Strickland and his National Center for the Arts and Technology.
“What we focus in on are two populations: One are public school kids who might be struggling academically and may be coming from difficult environments, and we use the arts as a strategy to work with those kids,” Strickland in a phone interview Tuesday. “The vocational part, in our case, is for adults, primarily for people who have lost a job or never had a job. We train them for careers in the service industry and technology.”
Strickland said there are currently three such centers based on the national center he started — in San Francisco, Cincinnati and in Grand Rapids, Mich.
He said he would like to eventually have 100 such centers opened.
A feasibility study has been approved by the school district, Martinez reported, and is expected to take twelve to eighteen months to complete.
Tags: at-risk students, education, nevada, schools
