Alternative High School

Name: Seowon Jung

Class: ESL100

Date: 5/12/2008

Many experts, governors, and politicians are focusing on how they make the maladjusted students stay in school to study. One of their programs is the alternative high school. They expect that if parents send the maladjusted students to alternative high schools, they will study hard. Can it be so? Do this kinds of students really want to study? I don’t think that the reason they don’t study is that they don’t like their school or the present educational system. Therefore, I raise a question the effectiveness of alternative high school.

According to Gay, “At-risk students are described as discouraged learners, those who for whatever reason do not achieve in the standard high school program. Poor attendance, habitual truancy, academic lags,and teenage parenthood-these are the causes of what the federal definition specifies as school drop-outs, from 9th to 12th grade. Over 25% of American youth fit that description” (2000). The important thing is habitual truancy. The meaning of habitual truancy is that they don’t want to study and attend at school anymore. Nevertheless, if the parents send them to an alternative high school, do they study and attend there? The experts have to focus not on alternative schools, but on making them to study of their own accord.



If so, how do we make them study and attend school? Indeed, this is the experts’ duty. So regarding my opinion, studying and attending at school are positively necessaries for life of every person. Parents have to inform them that we are not primitive men, but intellectual men. We are not living in the jungle. To live in the city with many people without bother, we have to be educated, cultured, and grounded. In conclusion, before we can focus on alternative schools, we need to think how we make students study and attend school.