How to Handle Dropouts

Students are free to smoke in the toilet and take food into the classroom. They sharpen their wits by playing a classroom version of the television game show Jeopardy. Field trips have included a canoe trip to learn firsthand how pollutants poison a river. A recent guest lecturer gave a frank talk on how to run a quick-fry chicken outlet.

So goes the educational process-at least for some teen-agers&$151;in the tiny (pop. 1,400) Ohio town of Mount Grab. The unorthodox program is the town's proud answer to a universal problem: how to deal with dropouts. In Mount Orab, the problem has been severe: for every 200 youngsters who graduated from the town's high school each year, 50 would drop out, often to do little more than hang out on the corner under the town's only streetlight.

The situation angered at least one Mount Orab resident, Richard Lodwick.

A former Cincinnati paper salesman who now raises Arabian horses in the Mount Orab area, Lodwick became interested in education first as president of the local school board and then as an elementary-school teacher. He recalls:

"All of a sudden we realized that what we were doing was educating the kids who go on to college and never come back to Mount Orab. The kids who stay and make their homes here are the dropouts. The community's education system was shortchanging the community." So Lodwick and the school board changed--or at least enlarged--the system.

With assistance from Ohio's statewide vocational-education program, they launched a class for dropouts. Since it started in July last year, it has become such a hit that some regular high school students have been tempted to drop out to join up. Indeed, a second class had to be formed this year. One reason is obviously Lodwick's down-to-earth approach to learning.

Grocery Math. No exercise the students perform is called a test. Instead, the class carries out weekly and monthly "agendas," which may include filling out math work sheets based on grocery ads in the local newspapers, or conducting a tough cross-examination of Mount Grab's vice-mayor on local government. "I'd rather have my class go to see a city council meeting or fix the city's fire hydrants than sit in school all day," says Lodwick. "They're not going to use algebra and Latin, but they might want to run for council or be a fireman some day."

The program has become an immediate boon to the community. Students work each afternoon on jobs that Lodwick helped them land, and Lodwick marches them to the local bank once a week to deposit 10% of what they earn. One boy runs the projector at the local drive-in, another who loves horses helps at the town tack shop. One has worked out so well on a nearby cattle ranch that the owner wants to pay the youngster's tuition at agricultural college.

Perhaps the most important thing that Lodwick's students learn is selfesteem. Says one: "Now we know we're not dummies." Adds another: "We used to be nothing, now we're something." All of which is most fulfilling to Innovative Educator Lodwick, who confesses that he has not enjoyed himself so much since he was 19 and a bodyguard to General Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II. "I love these kids," he says. "I think school should be taught this way no matter what you're teaching. I'd take this program anywhere, to any city, to the gates of hell. It would work."

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