Supporting CIS:
NFL football star
Shaun Alexander
is the organization’s national
spokesman.
dropouts is about $192 billion. Each young person
who drops out and moves into a life of drugs and
crime costs the nation between $1.7 million and
$2.3 million over his or her lifetime. And each dropout is one less candidate to meet a critical need in
our workforce.
Milliken has worked tirelessly as an advocate for
youths through Communities in Schools (CIS), a
nonprofit organization he founded in 1977 to help
kids stay in school and prepare for life. Now he is
making a passionate pitch to bring the dropout
problem to the national stage through a book, The
Last Dropout: Stop the Epidemic! (Hay House Inc.).
It details how the CIS model, which connects community resources with schools by bringing in adults
to help, mentor and provide role models for students, can work across the country—and how we as
a national community can and must play a role.
“We’re going to become a second-rate nation
morally and economically if we don’t solve this
issue,” he tells The Connection.
learn when their lives are in upheaval, whether it’s
due to poverty, a lack of health care, homelessness,
hunger or family problems. “They’re not ready to
learn because they’re worried about the fact that
their dad went to prison last night or they didn’t eat
or their teeth are rotting,” Milliken says. “And the
teacher is supposed to teach them?”
The solution, he says, is relatively simple. All
kids need what CIS calls the Five Basics before they
can succeed academically. They need a strong relationship with an adult, a safe place to learn where
they can concentrate on education, access to health
care, a marketable skill and a chance to give back to
the community (see “What kids need,” next page).
KEVIN RAY SMITH
A failed safety net
Where have we gone wrong to allow the dropout rate to grow to such levels? Milliken asserts that
it’s not just an educational issue—it’s a community
one. He says that in the half century following World
War II, the traditional safety net that helped raise
children—the extended family and the faith community—slowly unraveled. The community that
served as a model and met kids’ needs has failed,
and the Herculean job of meeting those needs has
fallen to the schools.
“We had a breakdown in the community, and
the schools were being asked to be mother, father,
sister, brother and social worker—and be great
teachers,” says Milliken. “They can’t.”
More specifically, Milliken says kids drop out
because they don’t have close relationships with a
caring adult. He came to this realization when he
first started working with street kids in Harlem in
the 1960s. “What we experienced on the streets was
that these kids weren’t dropping out of school
because of education, they were dropping out
because nobody knew their names, they felt worthless,” he says. “If a kid isn’t turned on to living, he’s
not going to be turned on to learning.”
Also, students can’t be expected to be ready to
From the ground up
Schools where CIS is active have extraordinarily
high graduation rates: In all, 80 to 90 percent of students tracked by CIS stay in school. The Five Basics
come from the years that Milliken and others spent
working with street kids, so the model was created
from the ground up.
Milliken was a high school student in a middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh who hated school and
dropped out because he had trouble academically.
He tried college, but dropped it, too. Through Young
Life, a Christian group with programs to help kids
in trouble, he started working with street kids in
Harlem. The basic approach was to form personal
relationships with them and encourage them to do
something with their lives.
Over 11 years, Milliken and other Young Life
volunteers opened a series of “storefront” schools in
New York inner-city neighborhoods to give kids a
safe place to learn. That led to four prep schools in
New York, where adult volunteers helped extensively
in a variety of ways, and eventually to the creation of
CIS, which tapped successful practices from the
street schools as its working model.
The Five Basics, which are at the heart of CIS,
were “born out of personal experience—my own, my
colleagues’ and the thousands of kids we’ve known,”
coupled with collective discussion within the CIS network that occurred over many years, says Milliken.
Today, CIS reaches 1 million young people and
their families annually in more than 3,400 schools
across the country. Local chapters organize volunteers
to come to the schools during classroom hours and
