This school destroyed my daughter. She has been with them since middle school. They failed to…read moreprepare my child for college, and instead of exposing her to college experiences, they withheld them from her as punishment. This failed to motivate her to do better. The school is for underprivileged low income families, and putting my child in there only exposed her to kids who were already troubled and she couldn't handle the lifestyle change. They labeled her trouble and punished her every chance they got. Now, because of a social media post 50 days until graduation, they expelled her and crushed the last of her remaining dreams. Then they want to tell her she will always be a dreamer and part of the dreamer family. I hope those meaningless promises made them feel better about destroying any remaining hopes and dreams my daughter has. She has given up on herself and her future. The school counselor was the absolute worst and always presented to my daughter with a negative attitude. The school failed to deliver what they promised and let both me and my daughter down with no place to turn. Words can't describe how utterly disappointed I am with the Achievable Dream Administration. The CEO of the school made a special connection with my daughter and gave her a phone number to call if she ever needed her help and when my daughter called it in distress prior to being expelled she failed to answer my daughters call for help and the administrator refused to let my daughter speak with the one person who could have made a difference. How do you invest in a child for 6 years and then kick them out with less than 50 days left to go. This school likes to brag about successes but hides their failures.

I became familiar with this organization through some work I did with them. An Achievable Dream…read moresaves children from poverty through education. Yes, that sounds dramatic, but their results are dramatic. An Achievable Dream is a magnet school. But rather than choosing high performing students, they choose their students from kids with the highest risk factors. They all must be eligible for free lunch -- in other words, living in poverty -- most of them are being raised in single parent or guardian households, and many of them have behavioral problems as well. Achievable Dream teaches the standard classes -- science, math, history -- but they also teach a variety of "life skills" classes, such as conflict resolution, money management, and "speaking green," which basically using standard American English. (The class is called "speaking green," because the idea is that in order to succeed in a business environment, you need to be able to speak properly.) They even have classes in etiquette, which may seem strange, until you realize that the goal is to provide these kids with the structure and discipline they don't have in their lives outside of school. Members of the community -- business leaders, police officers, and soldiers from a nearby military base -- serve as mentors and role models for the students. In addition, their school day is 8 hours long -- 2 hours longer than a standard day -- and they only get 5 weeks off in the summer. The results have been astounding. Over the past 15 years, AAD's students have closed the achievement gap between them and students in the rest of the state, regularly testing in the top percentiles. The organization now runs a grade school and a middle/high school, and students who complete the program are guaranteed college tuition. 90% of their graduates go on to college, and the other 10% serve in the military. An Achievable Dream has taken kids who would most likely have fallen between the cracks -- many of whom would be 1) unwed mothers, 2) in jail, or 3) dead before their 18th birthday, and helped them become productive members of society. In recent years, other school districts (including one in Waukegan, IL) have started using some of AAD's "best practices." For those of us who believe that education is the path to solving a lot of our problems, An Achievable Dream is truly inspiring.