Posted on January 5, 2006

Skillman Foundation Awards Among $3 Million to Detroit Public Schools

The Detroit public school system has announced nearly $3 million in grants from ten sources for a variety of academic, literacy, and professional- and youth-development projects.

The Detroit-based Skillman Foundation awarded three grants totaling $1.7 million, the largest of which, $1.27 million over seven years, will be used to improve national indicators of academic success in the district's fifty-two schools. The foundation also gave $165,000 for the hiring of two employees to work on financial monitoring and program coordination within the system, and $265,000 to the Principals Leadership Academy to extend the goals of the foundation's School Leadership network.

In addition, an agreement for more than $486,000 was made on behalf of the United Auto Workers and General Motors to implement the Detroit Manufacturing program, a school-to-work initiative that will enable high school seniors to elect a course of study that combines a focus on manufacturing with hands-on experience. A three-year, $65,000 grant from the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Foundation and the Intercultural Development Research Association in San Antonio, Texas, will support an international tutoring and drop-out-prevention program for students at Maybury Elementary School.

Also announced was funding through the 2007-08 school year for the newly developed United Community Hospital's Healthy Teens Community Care Center, through which the United Community Hospital and the Michigan Department of Community Health and Education will provide primary care, psychosocial and health promotion/disease prevention, and outreach services to students attending fourteen schools.