Harvard Education Letter: Shopping mall schools help struggling students succeed

In the May/June 2012 edition of the Harvard Education Letter, a publication of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, reporter David McKay Wilson interviewed SYF educators, students, and partners from both coasts as well as from the Midwest, who told McKay that the non-traditional environments of Simon Youth Academies foster student success.

In his report, McKay quotes James Wigo, the superintendent of the Rose Tree Media School District in Media, Penn., SYF’s partner in supporting the Simon Youth Rose Tree Media Academy at Granite Run Mall.

“We simply have kids who are square pegs trying to fit into round holes,” Wigo says. “We have applied every intervention, and it hasn’t worked. So rather than cut them loose, we provide the scaffolding to help them hang in.”

You can read the complete Harvard Education Letter report, Shopping Mall Schools, at the publication’s website.