 school officials.
"Attendance is so important," said Lorian Brownlee, assistant director of Cities in Schools. "If you can't get them to attend school, you can't help them. We feel the program has been very successful."
The number of students enrolled in Cities in Schools programs this year has increased by nearly 600 to a 1,600 total, she added.
In recent years, the school district has expanded programs that are aimed at identifying potential dropouts early enough to keep them in school.
Logan said about 3,770 students were identified and placed in dropout prevention programs during the 1987-88 school year. Of them, 1,176 were elementary students. In the racial breakdown, 47 percent, or 1,762 students, were black.
"The more elementary programs we can build, the more successful we will be because we need to reach kids early," Logan said. "Next year, I'm looking to bring that number up by at least 500 more kids."
In a summer retrieval program, Logan's staff was able to encourage one in every three dropouts to return to complete requirements for a regular diploma or General Education Diploma. Some returned to the regular classroom, others opted for adult education school and others enrolled in vocational education programs. It is a program Logan intends to continue.
"That summer program we will repeat no matter what it takes, because it works too well and it is too important," Logan said.
In the past three school years, the district's dropout rate has decreased from 13.8 percent in 1985-86 to 10.7 percent in 1986-87 to 7.9 percent in 1987-88.
DROPOUT PREVENTION PROGRAMS
During the 1987-88 school year:
-- 2,594 students in middle and high schools were enrolled in dropout prevention programs.
-- 1,176 elementary school students were enrolled in dropout prevention programs.
-- Of the 3,770 total enrollees, 1,762 students, or 47 percent, were black. There were also 1,580 whites, 363 Hispanics, 27 Asians and 38 Indians.
-- About 1 in every 3 dropouts contacted during the summer retrieval program -- or 439 individuals -- has returned to regular school, adult education or a vocational education program.
-- A state evaluation of the district's 94 programs showed 80 percent of them met or exceeded all objectives.
SOURCE: Palm Beach County School DistrictThis is a topic that gets a lot of people going, and you can't win, at least how you would like to win. I was raised Irish Catholic. And the other half of my family is baptist. I found I didn't agree with both sides of this religion. I decided this for myself, and will not be told that I'm wrong otherwise.

I guess my point is people don't like being told what, how, who, or why they should believe in pretty much anything. It's why door to door pushers get greeted with so much malice most of the time.To risk rejection in order to honour our truth. Iyanla Vanzant reminds us that even though it may seem safer and easier to conform and deny our authentic CHARACTER short term, it is not. Long term we just end up losing our self-respect and resenting others, when we have no one else to blame.
We are all individual miracles, one offs, here to love and do our life’s work with our own CHARACTERS signature. I often equate the human species to the K9 species when explaining assets and liabilities of our individuated human CHARACTER to clients. As St. Bernard’s, German Shepherds, Rottweiler’s and Labradors have different characters to Corgis, Chihuahuas, Dachshunds they are all nonetheless dogs.
Human beings also range in CHARACTER diversity as we are designed to bring to the world different gifts. Athletes, Musicians, Mathematicians, Engineers, Fashionistas, Introverts, Extroverts, Heterosexual, Homosexual, and Transgender are all specific forms of human CHARACTER. Where we do the greatest damage to ourselves and each other is when we try to change the truth of our hearts CHARACTER imprint or make it better or less than someone else’s.
 A Labrador will live a miserable life dieting trying to convince itself it will not have value if it cannot fit into a Dachshunds kennel. A Beagle will become depressed competing with a German Shepherd at a Police Academy.
As Human beings too often we become depressed and believed we have failed trying to be someone we were not designed to be. The Chihuahua will distort its miniature beauty, which is its gift, trying to change its true CHARACTER imprint.
So from this moment forward let’s remember to own, embrace and cease criticising and comparing our Labrador hips, our Chihuahua sensitivity and our Beagle playfulness with different species and concluding that someone has to be wrong?

Do you know what's better than a 2010 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup? A 2010 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup fitted with the new 411-horsepower, 6.2-liter V8.
I own the Raptor, I have the 5.4 engine and the NAV system and the upgraded orange seat inserts and the expensive graphics. My truck is incredible in every respect. The graphics make it look amazing, and it gets admiring remarks EVERYWHERE it goes. The NAV system is terrific, the interior is impressive. Everything about this truck is fantastic. When I see a vanilla version it just looks like another pickup truck. If you are going to buy this truck then do it right. The article is a typical reporter on the cheap. Before you describe a mile in my shoes walk that mile to see what it is all about. Then you will buy the truck the way I did.Clare Birchall (2006) Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip.
London and New York: Berg. ISBN: 184520143-4.
This study is a cogent and welcome examination of what Clare Birchall calls ‘popular knowledge’, i.e.. those ways of knowing that ‘circulate by way of mouth, television, talk radio, the Internet, tabloids, magazines and so forth, rather than verified, peer-reviewed academic journals, books or more “serious” or “elitist” forms of cultural output’ (21). These ‘knowledges’ tend to be populist and not bounded by legitimated or official knowledges. While there are many such knowledges extant in contemporary culture, such as alien abduction narratives, astrology, urban legends, self-help rhetoric, not to mention various new age practices, Birchall chooses to focus on two of the more compelling examples: gossip and conspiracy theory. The study would be worthwhile if the author had chosen just to discuss those two popular knowledges, but it does much more. Not only does Birchall’s work examine popular knowledges providing the historical background and formal attributes of both conspiracy theory and gossip; it orients the study of those knowledges within traditional academic disciplines, including sociology and anthropology. In addition, this study investigates the very thorny problem of what constitutes ‘legitimate’ vis à vis ‘illegitimate’ knowledge, and it does so while arguing for ‘cultural studies’ as a valued and necessary academic discipline. Given the study’s length (only 185 pages), it is a densely packed, closely argued tour de force on an important and timely subject.
Birchall stresses that anyone interested in the study of popular knowledges must begin by recognizing the inherent power struggle between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ knowledges. Accordingly, the author discusses the key theories of Michel Foucault, especially those that analyze ‘epistemic structures’ and how these structures relate to power. She begins with Foucault’s formulation of the ‘power/knowledge’ paradigm. Any knowledge structure cannot be thought of outside of this paradigm. She emphasizes one of Foucault’s key principles: power must not be thought of as a hierarchy only – power relations also can be seen as ‘chains’ that can influence culture from the bottom up or laterally. This dynamic is vital if we are to understand how popular knowledges such as gossip and conspiracy theory operate in contemporary culture. Further, we must see that the term ‘discourse’ refers to the unwritten rules that determine the boundaries of such knowledge. Thus, the constituent areas of knowledge ‘making’ are as important as the end product. According to Birchall, ‘It is this notion that I want to take forward, positioning popular knowledge as a discursive formation (though not a discipline) that is characterized by contexts that give rise to ideological formations’ (11). Moreover, she continues, ‘Popular knowledge is also that which has been excluded from other, more “legitimate,” discourses by practices embedded within rationalist institutions.’ Indeed, Foucault’s study of marginal texts and informal knowledges (i.e. non-canonical texts) sets a precedent for Birchall’s own study of ‘non-official’ knowledge structures. In the end, the author wants to ‘take forward Foucault’s way of thinking about the discursive conditions of production for and rules of constraint upon a knowledge-producing discourse’ (12). Foucault’s work helps us to understand the anxiety produced by popular knowledges when juxtaposed to Enlightenment rationalism.
The author then fixes her current study in relation to the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Sociology recognizes that ‘