Kids in the urban environment face some enormous challenges in trying to make it on a day-to-day basis.

• In Denver, nearly 7 out of 10 Latino students will drop out of school and 6 out of 10 African-American students will drop out of school. (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2009)
   
• Students enrolled in the public school system in Denver have an average graduation rate of only 58.8%. (www.dpsk12.org)
   
• Approximately 80% of kids in Colorado UpLift qualify for the federal Free and Reduced Lunch Program. (www.piton.org)
  • Children living below the poverty line are more likely to have difficulty in school, to become teen parents, as adults, to earn less and be unemployed more frequently. (America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2007)


• The number of gang-related cases investigated by Denver Police is up 83% since 2001. In 2006, one-third of the city’s 58 homicides were tied to gangs. (Denver Post, 2006)
   
• Studies have documented that inner-city youth experience high levels of life stress, poverty, and exposure to violence.
  • These stressors can negatively affect healthy adolescent development, and are associated with higher rates of emotional and behavioral problems and psychopathology. (Lever, Sander, Lombardo, Randall, & Rubenstein, 2004)

Our community and nation as a whole are desperately in need of intervention for a generation of youth who face a bleak future with these desperate forecasted outcomes.

According to the Alliance for Excellent Education (2009), the lifetime earnings for dropouts from the class of 2008 alone would add $4.3 billion to the Colorado economy. Colorado’s economy would see a combination of crime-related savings and additional revenue of about $90 million each year if the male high school graduation rate increased by just 5%.

Click here for a list of resource sites used for statistics.