Students Are Dropping Out of High School,

¶ … students are dropping out of high school, we need to get the money together to open up programs that will make sure that these former students can gain the educational skills they need elsewhere, so that they are able to keep a job. This will take a lot of work, understanding, and communication from all parties -- like the students, educators, and the community -- but we will find a means for these drop-outs to step up to the challenge and gain enough information and confidence to find a job and to hold down this job successfully.

It will not be easy to design the format of these informational programs or to raise the money to do it. We can, however, organize the program formats in several ways. Firstly, since we can divide the work into departments, that will help our employees to focus on their assigned work, without being distracted by other aspects of the large project. The first step will be to assemble a team of people who focuses their efforts on advertising, to make sure that the students who need help will hear our message. The next project would be getting these students enrolled. It might be difficult to make sure that they believe that their efforts, and ours, will be for a valuable purpose. In general, high school drop-outs have demonstrated that they are not that motivated to continue their education, so we need a team of people who can make sure that they understand that a high school education and the associated skills are the best route to a respectable job. One disadvantage of this departmental approach is that you might lose track of an individual student who you brought into the program, which might demoralize and demotivate a student who thinks that they are no "special." This might turn into an advantage, though, as they meet many new people who want to help them, thus boosting their self-esteem, their sense of self-worth and importance, and can let them know that many people can actually care about their future. In case of the first problem, though, long-term mentors are necessary so that individual students don't get lost in the process, so we will also designate a group for long-t mentorship of these students. The departments may be divided, but they are also a team that is all working towards the same goal, thus increasing teamwork and esprit de corps. With each person working their own department, then reporting back communally, teamwork can grow throughout the organization. Teamwork is an asset for the foundation by itself, but each person can also build on what another has to say by contributing their own thoughts and experiences overall, everything will improve.

The matrix organizational form is also worth considering for our organization. In this organizational form, people are divided into their skills. For example, in our project, some people are better at advertising and promoting, some are "people-persons" who are easy to talk to and get along well with other people, and some people are good with numbers, math, and logistics. The group that is gifted with advertising and promoting would go into the community to contact and recruit drop-outs, so that they know about and can use our program. Advertising is important, because these drop-outs might not be motivated to do much educationally at the moment, so we need charismatic and excited people who can encourage them along and motivate them when they falter. Our "people-persons" would be the ones who would mentor individual students. Finally, the people who are talented with numbers and math would cope with the program budget, finances, supplies, and scheduling.

Coming up with the excitement to recruit these students is not the only difficulty that we face, because we also have to compete with the available, low-skill jobs that want to hire them without an education. Jobs in fast food, manual labor like landscaping, and domestic work do not need a high school education, and they often prefer to hire unskilled, low-wage workers. To compete with these operations, we should hang fliers or brochures near the companies, business, neighborhoods, and places that are employing these high school dropouts.

To make sure that these fliers are effective, we will have a design team from our advertising department design, create, and print pamphlets, fliers, brochures, and other information about our organization. To compete with these low-education, low-skill jobs, we have to make the students think about wanting more from their lives. They might want a more fulfilling job, a better ability to care for their family, or their "more" might simply more income in the future from a better-paying job.

The community would have to supply some of our organization's financial needs, like a place to hold meetings. Sometimes meeting outdoors can be productive and fun. Once a week or so, instead of paying for a meeting place, we might hold a community outreach program at a local park. Drop-out students and even their families and friends could meet each other, along with possible and already recruited students, talk about the program and share information, and just have a fun time outside while learning about our organization.

Some community members might not be supportive of our program, as it would use city money to help drop-outs who, they will argue, should have just stayed in high school and gotten the same results for less money. They will ask questions like, since the government guarantees free high school education for every student, why should we pay money for this new program when their education should have been free to these students in the first place? In counterpoint,

we will explain that local schools are losing government funds from the increasing drop-out rate, and in turn the drop-out rate keeps rising. Our program does not encourage more people to drop out, but only help students who already have. It will revitalize the education system by driving home the point as to how important a continuing education is to a student and a citizen.

For our program to reach its goals, all of our possible foundation employees will need incentives to do their best. So that all of our employees are working at their top level, we will come up with a reward system. The employee who is most successful at recruiting drop-outs into our program, for example, will be rewarded. The employees, rather than the manager, will determine who receives the rewards and what they should be. For example, a manager might decide to give an employee a personal reward of money to take a few prospective students to dinner and talk to them about the program. There are a lot of ways that we could reward our employees for helping our foundation, but the best rewards are the ones that employees want.