•March 6, 2019•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

A thoughtful, experienced educator friend of mine has a proposal for getting kids at extremely high risk of failure out of their violent neighborhoods—send them to boarding school!
The idea isn’t so nutty as it might appear at first blush. The state of Illinois already has experience with running a boarding school: The Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) near Aurora. And the expense of taking kids out of the worst of the worst neighborhoods during their formative years might cost less than prison.
Charles (Charlie) Roy of Peoria is a senior fundraiser for Bradley University. He returned to Illinois from California a few years ago to be close to family. In the Sunshine State, Charlie was president (headmaster) of Villanova Preparatory School, an Augustinian Catholic school favored by Hollywood celebrities and the like, as well as for a few poor kids.
Charlie says that children from poor backgrounds can do well at residential boarding schools. So, Charlie proposes that Illinois consider piloting one or more 7th thru 12th grade “prep schools” for kids identified as otherwise likely—maybe almost certainly—to end up in prison.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.