To whomever it may concern, I received a letter in the mail this evening informing me I have been selected to attend WYSE this year and I was extremely honored. I actually ran inside my house and jumped onto my mother begging to be allowed to attend. She started reading, only to pause midway through one page, “It’s going to cost me $2000 dollars, Dee, and we don’t have that kind of money.” I cannot begin to explain to you the amount of disappointment I was feeling. I have this amazing opportunity to go to an amazing college and to Washington DC, and yet I cannot go. My mother works in a Southern West Virginia middle school for almost no money. My father is a warehouse stocker for a parts company, making even less than my mother. The two …show more content…
I am not looking to be a doctor, a lawyer, or really anything that pays more than $100,000 a year. I plan to become a Marine Biologist. In order to do so, I have to attend an out-of-state college, making me pay almost twice, if not three times, as much as I would should I go to an in-state college. I am going to need all the help I can get. Attending WYSE would give me a leg up on thousands of others applying for the same colleges I will be applying to. Even being asked to attend WYSE has made my entire week, possibly month. I understand I keep referring to my need to go to college, to make something of myself and that’s why I truly want to go to WYSE, but that is only half of the story. Have you ever been to Southern West Virginia? To Beckley or Charleston or, God forbid, Huntington? If you have, you’ve born witness to the conditions I live in. I am actually very fortunate, as neither of my parents, or really any of my close family, those who are still alive, are addicted to the drugs that plague my state. I see my fellow students at school high, drunk, some are even so out of it they cannot walk properly. My teachers cannot do anything to stop the drug abuse in high school students, mainly on the account that it is a pick and choose battle: either they come to school on drugs and my teachers can attempt to push them onto the right path or they can
In the book Letters to My Daughters, poet Maya Angelou wrote “I am a spring leaf trembling in anticipation of full growth” (163). Anticipation is a good description of how I feel about being a thirty-six year old college freshman. Anxiety, self-doubt, and dogged determination are on my list of emotions alongside anticipation, if I were being honest I would add. Providing my children with security, find true happiness in my career, and conquer my fear of failure are just a few things that hold my hand as I take this leap into higher education. Friends and family are surprised that I have gone back to school. In January of 2015 when I applied to South Plains College, I was working for AT&T making a good living. My mother especially couldn’t
Unfortunately, my family and I fall into an area of the middle class that prohibits us from receiving need-based aid. Although I have graciously been awarded the Elizabeth Ann Seton Scholarship, without some additional form of aid, a Seton Hill education may be prohibitively expensive. My fourth year’s tuition alone would cost $37,520 with my current scholarship, and I would still have to pay for living expenses. Once my undergraduate and fifth years’ expenses are included, I will be over $150,000 in debt when I graduate. As a student who has worked exceedingly hard in the classroom and as a leader for four years, this amount of financial burden feels like a punishment. If I do not receive the Seton Scholar Award, I am not confident that I can attend Seton Hill and make the impacts I have described in this
Parents today know all too well how unsafe our schools are. All you have to do is turn on the news and there seems to be a story about violence in schools and how it is drug related. One of the largest contributors to juvenile violence and delinquency is the use of drugs. If it were as easy as just taking it away, we would see more academic achievements by young adults, but it goes much further than that. The problem is much deeper than it appears at the surface, and it takes strong individuals to be willing to go into the depth required to make a difference in the situation. In the story, "A New Tradition of Courageous Dissent," by Myron Glazer and Penina Glazer, they t...
During my senior year of high school I received the Bill Gates Millennium Scholarship and was accepted into my soon to be alma mater, Howard University. In those times it was not uncommon for my grandmother to boast to the grocery store cashier, bank teller, or anyone who would listen that her granddaughter had received a full scholarship and was attending Harvard University. Each time I would smile and politely correct her by saying, “Grandmother I’m going to Howard not Harvard.” She and whomever she was talking with would simply protest that it did not matter which HU I was attending, they were proud of me regardless. From then on I vowed to continue to serve as an inspiration to the many members of my community who had never left the small town of Durham, NC yet alone received a higher education. I’ve since exceeded my own expectations of the things I would achieve in my college tenure. Traveling abroad, serving as an Americorps member, interning for my United States Senator, and joining distinguished organizations culminate a few of my successes.
Since the early 1990s, the degree of students abusing controlled substances has dramatically increased; abuse of painkillers increasing by more than 300 percent, abuse of stimulants increasing to more than 90 percent, and 110 percent increase in proportion of students using marijuana daily (Califano, 2007). In the most recent years, this issue of abuse has become far too common with the rate of illicit drug use of 22 percent among full time college students between the ages of 18 and 22 (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 2013). This percentage of substance abusers continues to dramatically increase annually.
My junior year of high school was filled with high emotions, stressful moments, and tension about where to apply to college and where I would be accepted and ultimately attend. At a “Making the Most out of your Sixth Semester” forum that year, the entire junior class experienced lectures from the school’s college resource counselors about how to prepare for this arduous battle of college admissions. The way Sue Biermert, who is the College Admissions Counselor at my high school, opened the forum was by asking a question to the parents that put everything into perspective: “How many of you parents feel like you are successful?” Every single hand shot up from the 500 parents in the auditorium. Of those that had their hands up, she asked, “How many of you parents received an Ivy League education?” Every hand went down. I could see friend’s mouths sit there in awe that getting an Ivy League education is not necessarily the greatest factor at having a good life. Even though these shocked students were the ones hoping to be accepted by Yale and Harvard, they all simultaneously recognized that going to an Ivy League school is not a guarantee for success in life. The reality about American culture is that success is the result of individual experiences that suit the needs of each person, not necessarily the prestigious institution of learning that one attends.
Drug abuse in America is a major problem. Especially among teenagers. Drugs have hurt the lives of nearly 40 percent of all teenagers in America. Either with health problems, DWIs, highway crashes, arrests, impaired school and job performance. These drugs that teenagers use range from Alcohol, LSD, Marijuana, and even Cigarettes. Most of the teenagers that are involved in drug abuse have either, broken families, parents that are drug abusers, a unstable environment where they are constantly moving from place to place, or there parents aren't exactly making a lot of money and they are never around because they are trying to make enough money for them to survive. But even to most ordinary teenager can have a drug problem depending on there friends, and relationship with there family.
By taking the necessary steps to create these prevention programs we can drastically lower the amount of people who are affected by this disease and continue to help those who are already in need. First, I argue that we can do this by expanding and improving drug education in the public education system. One of the most widespread drug education programs for grade level schools, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, known as DARE or the “just say no” program created by Nancy Reagan is still being used in today (Friedman). Unfortunately, this program proved to be ineffective with research showing that students who participated in the program were just as likely to use drugs as those who did not participate. While researchers are still debating over kind of disease addiction is they believe that it could genetic or psychological, which could open up the door for specialized drug education prevention programs (Katel, Friedman). For example, if we know that those who are at a higher risk for drug addiction carry certain traits in their DNA or show other psychological signs then we can test for these characteristics early on and create a program that is specifically targeted to help those specific individuals. Not only would a drug education program like the example that I provided be more
Drugs affect people in many different ways. One person can take abuse drugs, yet never become addicted, while another person has one experience and is immediately hooked to that drug. Drug addiction is defined as a dependence on an illegal drug, or medication. When you are addicted, you cannot control your drug use despite the fact that you know the consequences. The scary thing is that drug addiction can cause a major intense craving of drugs. Even though you want to stop, most people can’t do it on their own it is very difficult, and most need therapeutic help. For many people this is what is going to lead them to their death, or a long term mental/physical disability. Being addicted will also affect your relationships with friends and family as well as your employment status. Illegal drug abuse and addiction cost individual Americans upward of half a trillion dollars annually. This could be through medical, criminal, or even social expenditures. Drug use also contributes to an estimated 440,000 deaths by overdose per year. For the United States government, it costs hundreds of billions of dollars in increased health care, crime, and lost productivity. What can we do to prevent or help hopeless addicts from drug abuse and addictions? And whats our law enforcement officers doing about this situation?
Being accepted to college can be the most exciting time of a person’ life while also being the most disappointing. According to an article from Forbes, titled “Too Poor For College, Too Rich For Financial Aid,” author Robert Farrington wrote a story about his daughter’s college application experience. She patiently awaited to hear back from her top choice school, the prestigious John’s Hopkins University. After months of pure anxiety, a giant envelope arrived in the mail. The colorful exterior gave away the seemingly great news that the envelope enclosed. After opening the envelope, her acceptance letter revealed itself. According to Farrington, at first, the family was over joyed. Their kid got into her top choice college! But after moving
Few, if any, would argue that drug abuse in the United States is not a serious problem. However, the issue remains how to address it. The current schema of the politicized, militarized "war on drugs" does not appear to be working to reduce drug use in this country. More and more prisons are being built, with increasing numbers of citizens (particularly among minority populations) becoming incarcerated and subsequently trapped in the cycle of the criminal justice system. The current policies for punishing drug users not only imposes strain on monetary resources and infrastructure; they are in fact perpetuating great social suffering and injustice. What is needed is a systematic transfer from an ideology of punishment to one of prevention and rehabilitation, but practically, as in most cases, money will talk loudest.
“By law, every K-12 school in the country receiving federal money must have a drug prevention program starting in Kindergarten. But these programs vary widely, from one-shot assemblies to multi-week courses (Glazer p.657).” One of the popular school based programs is D.A.R.E. known as drug abuse resistance education. This program uses uniformed police officers to teach classes on how to say, “No” to drugs. One of the problems with this program is that it leads to the perception that drugs are a legal issue, rather than a problem in s...
High school students are leaders to younger kids and many others in their community. As a leader these student must show others what good character is like, but instead they are destroying their lives by doing drugs. In the past decade the drug use among high school students is on the rise once again. With the internet, their exposure to drugs is much greater. High school students are convinced that they are able to get away with using drugs. These drug addicts soon influence other students into doing the drugs because there isn’t a rule preventing drug use. In order to protect these student’s future, drug tests must be enforced among all students ensuring a safe environment for students to learn successfully. Allowing random drug testing in high schools will shy away students from trying these harmful drugs. The stop of drug use among high school students is crucial because drugs prevents student from learning leading them to dropping out of high school. Students that become overwhelmed by these harmful drugs will ruin their lives forever, but if steered in the right direction they can be saved.
The first step when beginning to implement drug education in a classroom or school is for the individual that is considering the topic to deem why the implementation is important. There are three main reasons teachers have found the implementation to be important. The first reason is that students are more likely to come in contact with drugs by hearing about them, or using them. By having a program implemented into a classroom or school, it can assist individuals to gain knowledge about the topic. The purpose of this is to help individuals make healthy, responsible decisions about drugs now and in the future that will reflect the individual’s identity and morals. The second reason is to help promote a healthy lifestyle for students. Teachers believe that by engaging students in drug education programs, it can help to benefit well-being of the students so that healthy lifestyles are reached to the fullest potentials. Lastly, teachers have found it to be important because teachers can act as a partner with parents, guardians, and other members of the community, in order to ensure that students are being provided with accurate and developmentally appropriate drug education. The school can provide knowledge to students in an area that is sometimes difficult for parents, guardians, and the community to talk about.
(1) There is much controversy regarding the war on drugs in America today. It has become a growing concern for parents, educators, politicians, etc. There is no question that education can play a major role in decreasing the drug problem. But there is some disagreement over whether schools or parents are more effective in steering children away from drugs.