Elmer Smith: First they won the lottery, now they get to win at life

THOSE FIRST 200 students who were admitted to the Arise Academy thought that they had hit the lottery.

They were right. Their names had been picked in a drawing of applicants, all of them in foster care. They were plucked from a statistical profile of students for whom failure seemed almost inevitable.

So last week, when the first 10 Arise graduates paraded down the aisle to the boisterous acclaim of their foster kin and biological families, the sigh of relief was heard across America.

Three of every four children in foster care at age 13 drop out before they turn 18, according to a study by the Philadelphia Youth Collaborative.

But it's not a Philadelphia thing. A study by the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty found that half of all American children raised in foster homes were jobless two years after leaving their foster families, and a third were underemployed.

That's why the children in that lottery weren't the only ones betting on America's first charter school for children in foster care. If Arise can beat the odds, it could start a nationwide trend.

It's still too early to claim victory. Arise got off to a shaky start. Roger Jackson, its first principal, was equal parts optimism and determination when he took the helm. But he didn't last.

"It was just a bad fit," Arise board chairwoman Jill Welsh-Davis told me last week.

There was an alarming dip in attendance rates, and Arise has had to negotiate the same road bumps that any start-up can expect to encounter.

"Attendance has started to rebound," said interim principal Al Bichner. "We did lose some students. But this school is based on relationships. Adults here are giving kids a reason to get up and come to school.

"About 10 percent of our kids are parents. It's not easy for them to come to school every day. But some of that cheering at graduation was from their children."

Nobody said it would be easy. But, in the most impressive index of success, all 10 of these first graduates are going on to post-secondary schools. Few high schools in America can match that percentage.

"I was worried that it might close," said Dianne Pough, class valedictorian. "I just kept believing.

"Now I think it will stay open for a long time. No other school does what Arise does."

The Arise experience helped Lisa Hicks, 17, understand that she's not alone. Some of her classmates had been bounced to new schools and new families almost every year.

"At first, I didn't want to go there because I didn't want to be labeled," she said. "But a lot of kids have issues. I got a chance to listen to them. Not everybody tells a lot of what they've been through."

Lisa, who has enrolled at Community College of Philadelphia to begin studying for a nursing degree, said that she has been in foster care since she was only "11 or 12"

"I never used to talk about my situation," she said. "But I got to interact with people who are like me. We don't have anything to be ashamed of."

Dianne Pough and her twin brother, Derrick, enrolled at Arise together. But because Arise allows students to work at their own pace, Dianne decided to work at an accelerated pace and graduate a year earlier.

She has been accepted at Delaware State University, and is preparing for a nursing career.

"I never thought about college," she said. "I couldn't put the process together financially. I didn't even think I'd get into college.

"When the letter came, I was shocked. I thought someone was pranking me."

Lisa and Dianne had the advantage of good foster homes. The Poughs' foster parents, Phillip and Rosalind Moore, and Marlene Greene, Lisa's foster mother, deserve a lot of credit. But their success is largely a result of their own resolve.

"I told them a lot of people said we couldn't do it," Dianne said in recalling her valedictory speech.

They should have known better. You never bet against a lottery winner.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith