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Who We Serve...
RCSD students, ages 14-18, who meet RCSF's income eligibility requirements, demonstrate good citizenship, and maintain a GPA ranging from 3.25-4.25.
The majority of these students are African-American and Hispanic young people who come from single-parent homes with an average family income below federal poverty guidelines and well below self-sufficiency standards. Over 60% are female.
In the 2006-07 school year, we served 52 of the approximately 450 RCSD students who are eligible for our program. Our immediate plan is an annual recruitment 18 -25 of the best and brightest 8th grade students with financial need and work to maintain them in the program throughout their high school career.
A Community Need...
With the increasing need to support the most at-risk and underperforming students in the RCSD, resources are spread thin. Consequently, students who are the top performers in the RCSD often get lost in the shuffle, receive little or no attention, and have difficulty accessing resources when they need support.
While 10% of RCSD students in grades 9-12 were eligible for the RCSF program in the 1999-2000 school year, only 4.5% met eligibility requirements 5 years later. Failure to invest in these students can only lead to increasing dropout rates at younger ages, higher unemployment and underemployment, increased crime and poverty rates, growing prison populations and increasing welfare costs, and ever lower wages.
A Millken study states that, "where companies used to attract intellectual capital, now intellectual capital attracts corporations." In an economy with an increasing appetite for educated workers, the cost of ignoring our most creative and brightest among the underserved population in our cities is exorbitant.
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