pportunity Doesn't Come, It's Here!

Educate. HOPE. Future.

Lack of education and low performance early in children's educational paths lead to the multiple issues we face in our communities among our teen and young adult population. For example, truancy is extremely high ranging between 38-52% of our teens; according to AYP on attendance over 680 of our teens are not in school on any given day; enrollment in the 11th grade drops in half indicating that youth do not make it past grade 10; and in any given quarter we have over 1,200 teen arrests. In turn this leads to other issues such as:

• Our average poverty rate is over 45% compared to 20% city-wide
  
• Unemployment is over 30% compared to the current 10.5% for the entire District
  
• 14.3% (approx. 10,500) of 18-24 year olds do not have a high school diploma or equivalency
  
• 20% of children live in households where the head of household is a high school dropout

Education and literacy impacts all of these issues and if we address it early on, we can help begin to tackle the bigger picture that plaques our neighborhoods.

Through our Pathways to Prosperity initiative we are transforming youth and young adults into high-performing, well-paid members of society. We are also helping children and youth make gains by using our technology training to support academic performance. Our current programs under our Pathways initiative inspire Education. HOPE. Futures. and include:

• IT Apprenticeship Help Desk Training
• Teen TechnoAcademy
• Lil Bitties TechnoCamp

Urban Ed is a certified testing center to administer a number of IT certification exams. These include:

• Certiport exams for Microsoft office applications
• Microsoft Technology Associate
• iCritial Thinking
• CompTIA STRATA certification
• IC3, and
• Adobe certified associate.

Urban Ed also has special projects that help support our Pathways initiative. These include:

• Community Development