For the third year in a row, Chicago’s Urban Academy Prep, an all male charter school in one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods, will be sending its entire senior class of 85 young men to four-year colleges or universities. As reported in the Huffington Post article found here, the school also boasts an impressive record with respect to how their graduates fare in college. 83 percent of 2010 Urban Prep graduates who went on to college have stayed there, compared to a national average of 35 percent among African-American males. The school has come an impressively long way since its founding in 2006, when only four percent of the school’s freshman class read at grade level when they entered the high school.
How are they consistently achieving such great results? Principal Dennis Lacewell says the keys to the school’s success are high expectations and having a culture that expects students to go to college. “The third line in our creed that we say every day is, ‘We are college bound,’ so from freshman year all the way through senior year, they’re saying that every day,” Lacewell said.
Congrats to Urban Academy Prep for continuing to build a strong legacy of success for its young men.