Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

What gets you out of bed in the morning? Work? School? Or the fun of helping others? For about 450 high school students in Pensacola, Florida, it’s helping others that gets them out of bed early on a Saturday morning, no less. That’s how many Catholic High School students will participate in this year’s Make a Difference Day on October 26. Why do they do it? Twelfth grader Zack Wyant remembers his first Make a Difference Day. “I just took a second and thought, ‘Look at all these kids out here. It’s early. It’s cold. Look at these people willing to give up and sacrifice.’ It exemplifies how much we want to help others.” Fellow Catholic High School Senior Tiarra Blackshear said, “My favorite part of being in high school is Make a Difference Day. I get a lot out of helping students and other people. It’s really fun to see students come together and help different people in our community, no matter who they are.” Both have done a variety of things over the past few Make a D...

This year if you were to visit a class of 40 students, on average by the end of the year ten of those 40 students will have dropped out of that school. In a school of two thousand students, that would be five hundred dropouts. Frightening numbers, aren’t they? General Colin Powell founded America’s Promise Alliance over a decade ago. In 2010, America’s Promise launched the Grad Nation campaign to fight back against the dropout trend.   According to the America’s Promise Alliance website: Grad Nation is a large and growing movement of dedicated individuals, organizations and communities working together to end America’s dropout crisis. Grad Nation goals include achieving a 90 percent graduation rate nationwide by 2020, with no high school graduating less than 80 percent of its students, and regaining America’s standing as first in the world in college completion.Grad Nation is a 10-year initiative focused on mobilizing Americans to end the dropout crisis and ensure that youn...