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ESD, Detroit School Students Offer Education Improvement Ideas

DETROIT (WWJ) -Students in the Detroit Public Schools want more help from adults with their studies, including more hands-on laboratories that expand on what's in the textbooks.

Those are among the recommendations of the Future Detroit Envisioning Tomorrow Together Youth Symposium, released Tuesday in an Engineering Society of Detroit event at Compuware headquarters in downtown Detroit.

The recommendations were an outgrowth of ESD's Future City campaign, held earlier this year. Renamed Future Detroit for 2011, the event challenges teams of middle school students to imagine a Detroit far in the future, and what makes it work as a city -- in terms of its economy, culture, energy supply, food supply, and more.

After Future Detroit, ESD decided to convene student teams from Detroit and the suburbs to plan the Detroit they'd like to grow up in, and to give them a voice and a stake in their future.

Based on the foundational work of the more than 100 students who attended the Youth Symposium, the ESD drafted the following recommendations:

* Establish a Schoolplace Security Advisory Council to focus on schoolplace crime, violence and bullying. It would be analogous to the Board of Police Commissioners to the Detroit Police Department, and include representative school administrators, studetns, teachers, parents, law enforcement and community and government leaders.

* Establish a district-wide Learning Interactive Council that would include instructional specialists, teachers, students and parents, to improve interactive, hands-on learning opportunities.

* Establish the Detroit Talent Incubator, in conjunction with the New Economy Initiative, the Kresge Foundation and other interested foundations, which would allow middle and high school students to develop their talents with volunteer mentors, including homegrown celebrities in the performance and visual arts.

In a question and answer session after the presentation, the students involved expressed a longing for more hands-on learning and a sense of community in the schools.

"We want more hands-on experiments in classes, not just 'read these pages,'" one girl said. "It doesn't stick in your mind as well" just reading.

And one girl said she didn't think the schools needed more metal detectors -- instead, she said, "I think we need to have more people there for our kids. Most people I know don't bring weapons to school because they want to be big and bad, it's because they think they're not protected and there's nobody there for them."

ESD executive vice president Darlene Trudell said the ESD is taking the recommendations "very seriously" and would pursue foundation funding to implement them.

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