Detroit Parent Network's Annual Breakfast Lifts Black Male Achievement
*Content provided by our sponsor, the Michigan Education Savings Plan.
By Sharlonda Buckman,
CEO, Detroit Parent Network
Last Saturday, during Detroit Parent Network's Annual Membership Breakfast, hundreds of families came together to celebrate parents as leaders in their community and kick off the holiday festivities with their loved ones. At Detroit Parent Network, we recognize parents as Champions for Children because they fight and advocate ensuring their kids are in a winning position. Parents are champions because they instill core values in their children at home from day one.
Youth not only need strong parents as role models in their lives, but community advocates, neighbors, friends, teachers, and principals that will step up to support the community.
But what happened to the neighbor or friend from church that used to lend a hand to help your family?
This year's Annual Breakfast event included a panel discussion on Black Male Achievement featuring Alton Dawson, a junior at Henry Ford High School, Devin Heard, a junior at Renaissance High School, and Xavier Powell, a sophomore at Pershing High School whom discussed what they believe needs to be done to set black males up for success and support them on their path to get there.
Each of the high-schoolers provided parents with personal insight into how the option of being recruited into a world of drugs and violence in their neighborhoods has a destructive impact on so many teenagers education and futures, but more importantly that some parents tend to turn a blind eye to what's going on with their child.
Each of them pointed to the fact that your standards for yourself begin within the home and that parents must play a crucial role in developing young people. Here is some of what they had to say:
"You have to want for yourself to know. You have to have a thirst for knowledge of what's going on around you, so that you can take part in that. Nobody is going to hand you something and say, here you go 'vote.' That is a right that people have fought for, that we have, that we should exercise because as you're seeing, we're going to end up where we were in the 60's as history's already begun repeating itself." – Devin Heard, 11th grader at Renaissance High school
"It actually all starts at home. When you put responsibility on your child to raise another child, that's going to affect that youth's success. They really won't be focused on their academics; they'll be focused on getting a babysitter and your child rather than themselves." –Alton Dawson, 11th grader at Henry Ford High School
