|
Educator expands Alternative Education program
by Dan Bustard
click HERE to view the article
Eagle Times - Nov. 5, 2005
"The population of kids I deal with have been written off. I do not write a kid off. I really don't." - Don McGee, director & founder of KMRIA, Inc.
The teacher who will never give up on a kid has found a new way to reach students no one else wants to teach.
Despite his gray hair and beard, Don McGee is proving he can learn a new trick or two in the process.
McGee, a long-time teacher in Springfield, wants to share his KMRIA, or Kids Must Read In America, program to a wider audience. Set up as a nonprofit alternative education program, KMRIA takes students unable to make it in a regular classroom environment or school districts' alternative programs. "I'm an educator of last resort," he said at an open house Friday at the Holiday Inn Express in Springfield to spread the word about the program. "The population of kids I deal with, they have been written off. I don't write off a kid. I really don't."
KMRIA targets students from kindergarten to 19 years of age. McGee hopes not only to provide the education equivalent to earning a high school diploma but also help students learn the life skills they need in the workplace.
"I had to have the life skills," he said, discussing the comput?er software he developed and other programs utilizing computers as his primary teaching tool. "They need to know how they should and should not act in a given situation."
KMRIA and public and private schools enter a partnership to provide children who are developmentally disabled, have been suspended or expelled or come from abusive homes the opportunity to learn a specialized curriculum. Vermont's dropout rate was 5.26 percent in 2003, closer to 11 percent in local schools.
"We are facing a new lost generation who know only a place to sleep and the streets on which they live," McGee said.
McGee said he has been hired by Springfield and Green Mountain Union High School in Chester. He will utilize software he wrote along with others from across the coun try. But it was a young Springfield student who made McGee realize computers were the key.
Justin Manly was born with a liver too large for his body. The resulting health problems made it impossible for Manly to make it through much of the school day. McGee became his tutor when Manly was in the eighth grade, and went to his principal and asked for a computer to connect his student to the world.
Manly turned his Cs and Ds into As and Bs, graduated three years ago eighth in a class of 14 and showed the potential of new world computers to an old school teacher.
"I couldn't tutor Justin enough without a machine like this," he said, tapping on a computer used at the open house.
McGee hopes the program's unique approach can continue to be successful. In its third year, the number of students involved nearly doubled from the first year to the second. It also has achieved a unique status. KMRIA is the second educational organization in U.S. history given nonprofit approval without its own building, McGee said.
KMRIA's director feels strongly about the need for programs like this, along with the need to support public education.
"It does no good to blame public education for every social and economic woe facing the nation," McGee wrote in an article called "A Child is Waiting."
"Such an over simplistic accusation is easily made, however, since we have continued to place more and more of our individual, family, and social responsibilities upon schools," he wrote. "Public education has become the scapegoat of all of America's anxieties and the available target of opportunity for our rage. We have failed to create for our children a stable, secure, and happy home life and the schools bear the burden of this guilt. It is our failure to adequately create for children a place to learn and a soapbox for dialog."
For more information go to the Web site www.kmria.org or contact McGee at (802) 885-1483 or by e-mail at donmcgee@kmria.org
Dan Bustard can be reached at 802-885-1707 or by e-mail at dbustard@eagletimes.com.
|
