Research shows that most urban dropouts leave school in the ninth grade, ending a process that, for them, began around the fourth grade, when they start to realize that the school curriculum doesn't relate to their real world. They gradually become, "Alienated from school culture, comfortable with street culture."

Failures of the Public School System

Rather than serving as a source of hope and opportunity, more often than not, schools are sites where urban males are marginalizes and subject to various forms of stigma. Consistently, the schools that serve urban males fail to nurture, support, or protect them. They label these males as behavior problems and less intelligent even while they are still very young. These schools punish our young urban males with severity, often without regard for their welfare even for minor offenses and they exclude them from academic work that challenge and promote their growth and deeper levels of understanding of the world they live in. Public schools have failed miserably when it comes to urban males under this systematic approach.

Cause and Effect

This degenerative cycle has caused a decline in urban males attending college and an increase in violence and crime in Hartford and throughout the country. The incarceration, conviction and arrest rates of young urban males have been a source of headline news across the country for many years. Among these statistics:

• 70% of Urban Males fail to graduate from High School
• One third (1/3) of Urban Males will do time in prison
• 72% of Urban Males are raised alone by their Single Moms
• The suicide rate for Urban Males has increased drastically since 1980

LPA's Effective Solution for Our Students' Success

While public schools focus on efficiency – that is the ability to put down knowledge on a piece of paper in an allotted amount of time – Leadership Prep focuses on effectiveness; the long term purpose of the graduating students from college and preparing them for life in the adult world of work, family and society. This method equates to more efficient student/man and change in the community.