Daniel Rubin: Budget's impact on one student

I love newspapering because real people are much more interesting than my imagination. They can also mess up a perfectly good column idea.

In theory, I had a straightforward piece to do: Go to where the 21/2-month budget impasse was doing damage.

Could there be a better example than a dropout program that the Philadelphia School District has had to knife? Slightly more than half of those who start high school finish - and that's an improvement over the past few years. It's a sobering, staggering stat.

I wanted to find a student trying to get back to school.

The district had been set to open an alternative high school in North Philly, where dropouts would work toward their diplomas. It would be run by Youth Empowerment Services (YES), which operates a successful GED program with an emphasis on audio, video, and graphic design.

The Center for Media Arts & Education was to open in November, above a Dunkin' Donuts at Broad and Lehigh. The lease was signed, places were set for 100 students. YES officials had made several hires, including a director who'd been a regional administrator with Teach For America. So far, so good.

Taylor Frome, YES executive director, was driving home on Sept. 3 when she got a call from Courtney Collins-Shapiro, the district's accelerated-schools chief.

"She said, 'I have some very, very bad news for you,' " Frome recalls. " 'The district will be unable to fund your school.' "

District officials say that Friday's budget deal will hand them about $150 million less than hoped for. Even Frome puts her chances of opening the school at less than 50-50. "It's a bad time to organize a public outcry," she says. "So many things are being cut."

So I spent some time this week at the smaller GED program she runs at Broad and Poplar, curious about why students drop out.

I wasn't prepared for Danielle Harris.

She is 19 and lives with her mom and younger sister in Southwest Philly. I asked her what caused her to leave school in January 2007.

"I had a problem," she said. "Assault on my principal."

That sound you heard was my notebook closing.

"You slugged your principal?"

West Philadelphia High School was always freezing, she said. Her principal had a No Hoodie rule. She was cold. She was walking to the bathroom, hood up, when the principal tapped her.

That bit of physical contact set her off. She reached up - she's 4-foot-11 - and caught his chin with her fist, she said.

That ended her schooling.

I began to think: Danielle Harris must be what legislators in other parts of the state picture when they say they're tired of giving so much money to Philadelphia.

They should look closer.

Danielle's just what they

should

be spending money on - she is trying her best to be someone other than that angry girl, so she commutes an hour and a half on SEPTA every day to the GED program, showing up all summer and mastering the skills so that when she finishes her video of Philadelphia skateboarders, she will have earned an Apple computer.

"It's a hands-on place, a nurturing place," she said. "It expands a child's creativity."

She's such an endorsement for the ability of media arts to help turn a person around that she was one of the dropouts asked to sell the School Reform Commission on expanding the GED program into a diploma program.

Now she refuses to accept that the school may not open. "I have no idea what I would do," she said, "because this place is my stepping-stone. This is my comfort zone. Without it, I'm going to be lost."

Getting a diploma means more to her than passing a GED exam. "The GED says, 'Something happened to you,' " she said. "The diploma is my second chance to say, 'I finished high school.' "

Root for her.