Keihen Kitchen / ideastream staff
Just five years ago, Keihen Kitchen had a lot on her plate.Her mom was struggling with cancer. The father figure in her life recently passed away. While living in what she calls a poor neighborhood on the west side of Cleveland, life took yet another turn.“I had my own medical disabilities I was fighting,” the now 18-year-old explained. “I actually had to drop out for a short period of time because I had to have surgery every three to four months. And this is on top of everything going on with my family.”Kitchen’s not alone in dropping out--roughly 24,000 students in Ohio leave school each year. And, like Kitchen, many point to circumstances outside of school walls that contribute to the problem.“A lot of the challenges I had in high school didn’t actually have to do with the schooling,” she said. “They were more about my family and the problems at home. I feel like that’s a problem that a lot of kids face.”In an interview with StateImpact Ohio earlier this year, Colleen Wilber, former vice president of communications for America’s Promise Alliance, said dropouts of each demographic overwhelmingly seem to share that same problem.“I think one of the things we see sort of across the board here is that these are students who are struggling with a lot of life issues and other issues outside of the classroom,” she said.And that theme examples of how to overcome those issues was on display last week during an American Graduate event held at Cleveland’s WVIZ/PBS station.Kitchen, along with three other college students, spoke to a hundred eighth graders from a low income Cleveland neighborhood. The goal was to motivate those students to finish high school.One audience member asked the panelists if they had any “life struggles” while making choices about high school and college.Current Cuyahoga Community College student Kitchen shared more of her story, and other panel members chimed in with their own journeys, too.“My life struggle wasn’t health,” said recent Morehouse College graduate Kendal King. “It was financial.”He said his mom lost her job while he was in high school. The lights were getting cut off. Their home grew cold when the heat went out. Eventually, financial responsibility got passed along to him.“Somebody had to make some more money,” he said.Those roadblocks could actually be used as motivators, event moderator Basheer Jones told the students.“You don’t have to look so far outside of your homes to realize what you don’t want to be,” said Jones, a Cleveland Metropolitan School District graduate himself. “So if you want to be great, be opposite of those people that are doing things that you don’t want to do.”The discussion hit home with eighth-grader Taylor Jackson. Like Kitchen, she said she’s struggling with a family member with cancer.“My grandmother has cancer,” she said, choking up. “She’s on life support now, and she always told me she wanted me to go to college.”The event came along with an added bonus for Jackson—a new role model.“Keihen really put it into perspective what I can do because of what she did,” she said. “I really wanna be like Keihen.”ideastream staff spoke with students before and after the event to learn how they felt.