Some Indiana University professors haveproposed a novel way to give struggling inner-city students a freshstart: send them to boarding school in Africa.
The project is still in its planning phase, andits backers admit it faces legal and financial hurdles. But theprofessors want to establish a school in the West African nation ofGhana where Indiana teachers would instruct some of the state’s poorestchildren.
“The core idea is to pull kids out of anenvironment where they cannot thrive and put them in one where theycan,” said law professor Kevin Brown, who leads the group behind theidea.
Backers would have to raise $4 million indonations to build the school, but the $10,000 or so the state paysurban districts for a student’s education each year would cover theclasses, room, board and travel, said Brown, who teaches at theuniversity’s Bloomington campus.
Issues such as student safety and legalliability must be still be addressed. But a similar project launched inthe 1990s by the Abell Foundation and the Baltimore public schoolsystem in Kenya operated for seven years until being shut down amidfears of terrorist attacks on Americans after 9/11.
Brown and his group hope to persuade an urbanIndiana school district to back the project or for the IndianaDepartment of Education to sponsor it directly.
“It’s going to be a hard sell,” IndianapolisPublic Schools Superintendent Eugene White told The Indianapolis Star.”IPS would be interested in participating, but it’s prohibitive in alot of ways for us. The legal liability is just too great for me toconsider that.”
The founding group includes professors of law,business, psychology, marketing and education, and all are offeringtheir time to work through any issues.
They chose Ghana because it is among the moststable countries in the region, with a history of peaceful transitionsof power and a large community of American expatriates. IndianaUniversity also runs summer programs for students in the country.
Parents of Baltimore students were veryreceptive to the idea of the Kenyan school in the 1990s, said JohnWalsh, who was a member of the school’s board.
“It was often the case that an observer wouldsay, ‘Why so far away, and why to Africa?’ ” he said. “That was not aquestion their parents would ask. They would say, ‘Wow, that’sexciting.”‘
That school had most of its students graduate orreceived GEDs, which would have been unlikely for them back home. Theboard of the Baraka School still hopes to reopen it at some point, andWalsh said the model makes sense for other cities to replicate.
“For at-risk kids that are living in neighborhoods where there are drugs and violence,” he said, “it’s a no-brainer for me.”