CHARLESTON S.C.
Takara Perry knows if she had stayed on at St. Johns High School, she would simply have dropped out.
“I had thought about it. I was making Cs and Ds and just scraping by,” she said. “There were a lot of students in each class and a lot of distractions.”
Now the 17-year-old is a senior on the A-B honor roll at Septima Clark Corporate Academy, a school created to help children at risk of dropping out complete their degrees. She hopes to pursue a nursing degree at Clemson, something she never dreamed of two years ago.
For 17-year-old Tyrell Reed, lost in the crush of 1,900 students at West Ashley High School, the situation seemed even more dire.
“I was so bad off I felt if I didn’t move on in the right direction I would end up on the streets,” he said. “I was just running with a rough crowd.”
Now a junior in his second year at Clark, he hopes to pursue his dream of going to art school to learn photography.
