Urban Prep All Male Charter School Makes Good

There have been several articles recently about schools that are not up to par. News about schools that are being closed for lack of student progress seems to be every day news. There are news reports about schools where the entire staff is being fired and much more. It seems there is rarely any good news about eduction, but I recently found some very good news concerning a school. The school is Urban Prep Academy, Englewood Campus.

Urban Prep Academies in Chicago, Illinois states on its website that 1 in 40 African American males will not complete college. The website also states that they believe all of their students will. They are indeed on the correct track. With a graduating class of 107 male students each and every one of them has been accepted into a four-year college. They have a list of 72 colleges from across the nation to prove their point.

Even the most cynical person would have to agree that this in itself is a wonder accomplishment. If you check with some of the more affluent prep schools, they somehow don't even get their entire senior class to be accepted into four-year colleges.

Urban Prep is a charter school that was founded in 2002. Their founder Tim King along with a diverse group of African-American leaders in education, business and the community had a mission to help urban males receive college educations. They focused on urban African-American males stating they were very much under served. The school officially opened in 2006 as the Englewood Campus. In 2009 they opened their second school in East Garfield Park. With the success of these schools a third campus is in the works.

The school strives to remind its students that they can succeed in college and beyond. They constantly tell them that they should not fall into the negative stereotypes that are perpetuated in the media, and the low expectations that the world holds them to.

Urban Prep Academy has clubs, sports teams, a student run newspaper-everything that the regular public and private schools offer. The school day at Urban Prep is an extended day. They also require their students to take more English classes than other schools. This will enable them to read, write and speak more effectively in the future.

Selection into the school is done by the lottery system. At the beginning of their freshman year 96 percent of this year's graduating class could read only at a fourth grade level. This makes this feat even more amazing.

Some of the colleges that the students will attend are: Morehouse, Fisk, Texas Southern, De Paul and many more. This was such an amazing accomplishment that the mayor of Chicago came to congratulate them. In a city where the education system is always under fire, this was indeed good news. It was even more amazing that these students were the very first graduating class of Urban Prep Academy.

With their dress code of blazers and ties they have proved to all that they can succeed. These young men have been given a great opportunity-one that they have been taught to complete.

You can read more about Urban Prep Academies at http://www.urbanprep.org. Urban Prep has become a model for other schools to follow. There are other cities that are now considering same gender schools. The success of this school has many school districts thinking outside the educational box.