Volume 15, Issue 4 - Sept. 4, 1992

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VOLUME

15,

ISSUE

4

SEPTEMBER

4, 1992

THIS WEEK•••

DENVER, COLORADO

Campus Involvement Week

NEWS Teacher cut? If the state sales tax doesn't

get passed in November, MSCD may have to cut faculty. page 3

.' ... I:

Take a wAJl( Student walkets collect pledges to raise money for AIDS care providers. pqe8 !

Kevin King digs in and makes lunch out of a gold fish at Wednesday's club recruitment day. The 'Club Eat Your Fish' display won 'best booth' at t.h e back-to-school festival. Photos by Dominic Chavez

Investing in the future FEATURES

With in~er-city graduation rates at an all-time low,

From Ru with ...

MSCD outreach program gives kids a fighting chance Mike Hall

Professors come to MSCD to teach students a thing or two about Russian life. page 12

SPORTS It's my ball! The Rugby club bruises the Bassalopes in their homeopener win. page 19

The Metropolitan

Until a year ago, nine out of 10 impoverished children in a low-income ~si ng complex neighboring Auraria campus stood little chance of ever donning the regalia of a high school graduate. Now, the odds are better. For the past year, children at the Lincoln Park Housing Development, located south of Auraria across Colfax Avenue, have enjoyed basic educational resources s uc h as dictionaries ~nd encyclopedias unavailable to them in their homes. The development's Educational Resource Center, the only one of its kind in Denver, also is furnished with what has warmed Lincoln Park's residents to what lies at the core of the center's popularity: a computer laboratory. The lab is a vital ingredient in the center's effort to slash the number of its students who drop out of school , permanently. A full 70 to 92 percent of children in low-income housing developments will never see the tail of a tassel, said Dr. Antonio Esquibel, a professor of English at MSCD and associate vice president of

the college's Community Outreach program. At Lincol~ Park, 89 percent of high school students do not graduate. "If you ' re a student in a housing development, your chances of graduating from high school are almost nil ," said Esquibel, who collaborated with the University of Denver and the Denver Housing Authority to establi sh the learning center. · Lincoln Park houses 950 residents in 420 units. Over half of the residents, about 500, are children, 250 of whom are under 4 years old, said Tina Segura, director of the University of Denver's Bridge Project, the school's community outreach program. The toddlers represent a bunker crop of potential drop-outs . But the center is targeting the children it sees as the greatest risk of leaving school, those in grades one to seven, who fall behind in class and never catch up. "If you don't get those (math) time tables in third grade, you're going to have a hard time all the way through," Segura said. To confront the formidable foe of educational attrition among its povertystricken children, Lincoln has armed itself with eight IBM computers, loaned by

MSCD in 1991 when the college upgraded its computer laboratories. The computers are Loaded with educational programs about word processing, typing, basic math and how-tooperate a computer. Before classes at the center resume Sept. 25, computer software covering higher levels of math, crafting sentences, spelling and foreign language will be added, Segura said. Computer exercises for presch"oolers will also be available. "We find that kid s get tired of programs fast," Segura said, explaining that new programs are needed to feed the c hildren 's mushrooming interest in computers. Lincoln Park children also hunger for tutelage, and the undivided attention accompanying it. "The kids just gravitate to our tutors and mentors," Segura said. "There's a real need for each student to have a mentor." The center's tutors, all volunteers, assist the children with their school work and in learning from the resource center's growing trove of educational software. More important, Esquibel said, is the

see OUTREACH page 4


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