Hearing the perspectives of residents can help you understand the story behind the numbers. When you better understand your clients' world, you can improve the effectiveness of your services.
More than half of the adults in B.W. Cooper did not finish high school or obtain a GED-we asked residents why they thought this was the case and what should be done about it:
50.7% of B.W Cooper residents over 18 don’t have a high school diploma or GED compared to 25.4% of Orleans Parish overall. What do you think accounts for this difference?
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You hear a lot of them say it’s boring. Once a child gets to middle school and you’re not really offering them anything or you’re not really putting effort into educating them and all the expulsions and the suspensions -- once they get on the street and get the feel of that, they don’t want to go back to school, you know?
And then we have a lot of our young girls who become pregnant and because their parents work, they don’t have the right to get child care assistance. Because if you’re a minor, then it’s based on the head of household, your parent has to apply for you. Just like for TANF, if you’re under 18 then whoever house you’re living in, you’ll have to bring all of their income and stuff into it. So sometimes that income may go over the limit to get child care assistance. And the assistance is being cut. They used to pay like 90% but because of all the budget cuts and everything, they pay 70% and you pay 30. Or if you’re working fast food, then you’re still at minimum wage, and if you work, that means your rent goes up. Now you’re looking at an additional $85 or so for one job, additional to pay the nursery. So a lot of the girls, you know, can’t afford it. And if you have a babysitter, you know, if I ask you to keep my baby but then you have something on your schedule then I can’t leave my baby with you, so everyday a child may have to go to a different relative. Then the girl just wind up saying, ‘I’m a just stay home, take care of my baby. I’m not gonna go to school.’ And then there’s nobody there to really encourage her or be that safety net for her, so that contributes to a lot of the drop out rate.” |
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A lot of them saying it’s the teachers ain’t teaching. Like everybody in my generation say teachers ain’t teaching. Now the kids come and say the teachers ain’t teachin’. I don’t know what’s going on.” —21 year old groundskeeper (December 17, 2004) |
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Probably they’re dropping out of high school because of pregnancies or maybe an 18 year old is responsible for little sisters and brothers. And some don’t have any adult supervision. I’m working with a 16 year old girl and her 75 year old great grandmother is raising her. I’m pretty sure she’s telling her grandmother, you know, anything. But they need constant guidance. Based upon me raising my kids, if it wasn’t for me talking to them every time an incident happened—giving them the full understanding of how you have to live in the neighborhood—I was steadily pressing—just doing it with them that way, I think, it saved me from going through them dropping out of school. And the whole time they were in school, I was a volunteer parent. I was on welfare but most of my days were at school volunteering, helping with them, you know. And I have three kids. My 21-year-old, she’ll be graduating, from a scholarship—she’ll be graduating from Southern in Baton Rouge. You really have to prepare them—even just to play outside sometimes. It’s rough just growing up here. It is.” —49 year old member Board of Directors of the Residents Council (March 8, 2005) |
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Boys see their friends not going to school. They’re on the street making money. So I mean, you be like, ‘Man, I should not go to school. I could be making money too.’ People want to follow other people footsteps, ’cause you see him young with a car, you see him wearing nice clothes, stuff like that. So clothes and money and all that kind of stuff bring on a lot of women. A lot of people just really want that, they want fame, they want to just have a lot of cash. But they be dumb most of the time, can’t even count they own money. It’s a lot of boys drop out at ninth grade. You very seldom see a female dropout unless it’s teenage pregnancy and they don’t have no babysitter.” —27 year old nursing assistant (December 16, 2004) |
What effect do you think the high rate of low educational attainment has on the community?
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That brings a lot of negativity to the community to have so many people unemployed and just hanging around, you know. It brings down the community in the fact that we have so many children that are uneducated. It’s very negative when you talk about children that are not educated, especially Afro-American children and Afro-American males. Because if you look at the criminal system, the majority of them are Afro-Americans. Basic thing is at least to be able to read to get you to understand what you’re doing—not to sign off on anything that you may sign off your life to, you know. When a child goes in to the criminal system, you know, and they make these plea bargains or they talk to somebody—and some of them sit up there and won’t even tell their attorney they can’t read. And you just signed off on things because people are talking to you and tell you what this says. But it’s different when I can read it and understand it without you just telling me what I’m signing off to. So to us reading, if anything, is a basic need, especially in our community for young people.” —54 year old community outreach coordinator (March 8, 2005) |
What thoughts do you have about what should be done about the low educational attainment here in BW Cooper?
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They could get the drugs out from back here. Then you could see a big difference.” —27 year old nursing assistant (December 16, 2004) |
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They need a lot of tutoring. They got a lot of people scared to step up and say they need help. And they need afterschool activities. Play basketball, you know, get them into something. Playing basketball kept me out of trouble. They need to straighten up before it’s too late, that’s what I be trying to tell them. They gonna mess around and be just like me saying, ‘I wish I could’ve did this.’ It’s gonna be too late for them. They should go to school instead of doing all that fighting and all that stuff. It ain’t even much called for. I wish I had been focused instead of being big-headed.” —21 year old groundskeeper (December 17, 2004) |
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Maybe training them for jobs—opportunities, you know. Encouraging them that an education is important. Looking at different kind of training. Maybe even training they may not even get a high school diploma but at least if you’re educated enough to at least know how to read and write and can hold even a minimum wage job.” —54 year old community outreach coordinator (March 8, 2005) |
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They need training. For a lot of them, before they can even think about trying to even look in a newspaper, they need some skills.” —49 year old member Board of Directors of the Residents Council (March 8, 2005) |
Source Citation: "Beyond Data: Straight Talk from some B.W. Cooper Residents." (Winter 2005). Interviews by Greta Gladney, Allison Plyer, and Audrey Warren. Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. <http://www.gnocdc.org> (April 25, 2006).