Stories like Symko’s are certainly inspirational, but what practical use do they hold for schools and communities dealing with soaring dropout rates? Probably not much.

Ben Symko (Rex Larsen - Grand Rapids Press)

The reality of the situation is that it often takes an extraordinarily random chain of events to turn around a high school dropout. No single well-meaning teacher in a classroom can do it alone.

Just look at the string of coincidences Symko benefited from. At 17, he was looking at a 93-day prison sentence for stealing alcohol. Instead of forcing Symko to serve his sentence in jail, the judge in the case allowed him to travel with his father to a monastic style “spiritual boot camp” in Florida. While at the camp in Florida, Symko became friends with a nun who arranged for him to travel to Italy and manage a clinic for heroin addicts.  One year later, the same nun arranged for him to move to the Dominican Republic to help mentor orphans. While in the Dominican Republic, Symko met Bren Simon, a philiantrophist from Indiana. Simon was so impressed with the work that Symko was doing, that she agreed to finance his entire undergraduate education, plus three extra years for law school.

Although, Symko’s teenage years were rife with struggle, he eventually hit a streak of good fortune that helped him turn his life around.

In the book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that being in the right place at the right time is only half of the equation for success. The other half, Gladwell argues, is a capacity for hard work – as demonstrated by accumulating 10,000 hours of practice to master a given skill.

When one combines opportunity with hard work, like Symko did, good things happen. But, where exactly did Symko’s newfound penchant for hard work come from? How did he go from an unmotivated high school dropout to someone who was willing to work around the clock for nominal pay in far-away locales? It’s all about options.

Many teenagers do not see education as a necessary step to getting what they want out of life. As crazy as it seems, some students think they have the option of getting a good paying job without a high school diploma. I have had numerous students tell me that they can make upwards of $40-$50 an hour “working with their dad” or doing unskilled manual labor, even without having a diploma or a GED. They perceive that they have options that do not require school.

And if the $40-an-hour job doesn’t come to fruition? They have that scenario covered too, with the option of living off of friends, family, or the federal government.

It is entirely possible that Symko saw these options for himself when he was a wayward teenager. However, when Symko was shipped to Florida, Italy, and the Dominican Republic, he found himself stripped of options. Gone were the comforts of home – things like running water, cable television, the internet, and easy access to alcohol. All that was left in their place was hard work and sacrifice, which Symko then embraced.

To me, this is an interesting paradox. The traditional line of thinking is that communities should provide “at-risk” students with more opportunity – newer schools, better teachers, and state-of-the art computers -so they will, in turn, perform better.

Perhaps we have the dropout problem backwards. Maybe these students need less opportunity and fewer options. Maybe they need to see life through the eyes of an orphan in the Dominican Republic or a heroin addict in Italy.

It worked for Ben Symko.

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