MENTORING RESCUES AT-RISK YOUTHS

WASHINGTON -- Acton Archie was a street criminal and likely high school
dropout eight years ago in North Carolina.

Now the 23-year-old graduate of North Carolina State University has a job
as a business analyst for computer software firm SAS in Cary, N.C., where
he makes $40,000 a year. (img)

In ninth grade, Mr. Archie says, he was skipping school, using and selling
drugs, stealing cars and "staying one step ahead of arrest and prison."

Today, he serves a mentor and tutor for Communities in Schools (CIS), where
he says he wants to help children in poverty to "stay in school and choose
success."

Mr. Archie's father was killed when he was in the second grade. His mother
sold the family's monthly allotment of food stamps to support her
crack-cocaine addiction. The main attraction at school for young Acton was
the free breakfast and lunch he received each day.

One day when he was skipping class from Olympic High School, CIS site
coordinator Rodney Carr came looking for him.

"He was a smooth-dressed, smooth-talking African American," Mr. Archie told
CIS supporters at a recent dinner hosted by Dan Glickman, president of the
Motion Picture Association of America. "It just took a 15-minute
conversation for me to realize he cared about me. He actually made a deal
with me. He said, 'If you will fight to stay in school, I'll fight to help
you go to college.'

"Now, it's my obligation to give back what I can, to go back to speak to
children," Mr. Archie said.

CIS is cited in a recent report by Educational Testing Service of
Princeton, N.J., as one of the country's most effective dropout-prevention
programs.

The group operates in 28 states and more than 3,000 schools. It provides
adult mentors who become "big brothers and big sisters" to children and
their parents to "help them with the multiple stresses of daily life, most
often factors outside of school," says Bill Milliken, who founded the
organization 30 years ago in the Harlem section of New York City.

"It's not handouts; it's not a freebie," says Wall Street investment
executive James M. Allwin, CIS' board chairman. "It's just a gentle hand
that so many kids need. If they don't stay in schools, they end up on the
streets; they end up in drugs. ... This is not an isolated problem. It's a
challenge throughout the country."

James Woody, CIS executive director in the District, says the
stay-in-school group established a start-up program at Turner Elementary
School in Southeast. Plans are under way to expand to four more D.C.
schools in the fall.

"In D.C., 56 percent [of students] drop out during middle school," he says.
"What opportunity is a kid going to have that doesn't go beyond seventh grade?"

Marsha Parker, principal at Turner Elementary, says CIS' involvement helped
to forge a partnership between the community and public schools, which need
to work together for neighborhood and school improvement.

"CIS provides another layer of community support and resources," she says.
"Many of my parents are not familiar where those resources are available."