Citizenship and Sustainability

AT&T Aspire: Connecting Our Youth

AT&T Aspire is a $100 million initiative to address high school success and college and workforce readiness. This program is AT&T's most significant education initiative to date and one of the largest corporate commitments ever to address high school success and workforce readiness.

The $100 million AT&T Aspire program includes four key components:

• Grants to school districts, school district foundations and nonprofit organizations focused on high school retention and preparing students for college and/or the workforce. As part of this commitment, the AT&T Foundation launched a new grant program focused on high school success for at-risk students.
• Job shadowing for 100,000 students, in conjunction with JA Worldwide (Junior Achievement), giving students the chance to see firsthand the job skills they will need to be successful in the future. This is the largest corporate job-shadowing initiative Junior Achievement has ever undertaken.
• Commissioning the next chapter of major research on the high school dropout issue and solutions by directly engaging educational practitioners. Research was conducted by John Bridgeland, author of the landmark report The Silent Epidemic, with Peter Hart Research for AT&T and America's Promise Alliance.
  Click here to view the executive summary.
  Click here to view the full report.
  Click here to view the supportive statements.
  
• Underwriting 100 community dropout-prevention summits, organized by America's Promise Alliance, to engage education experts and community leaders across all 50 states around the high school dropout crisis and ways to address it.

AT&T Supports Get Schooled

Get Schooled is a national platform that connects, inspires and mobilizes people — from policymakers and corporate leaders to communities and kids — to find effective solutions to the problems facing America's education system.

This five-year national high school retention awareness initiative was co-developed by Viacom and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. AT&T is supporting the program with $1 Million through AT&T Aspire, a $100 million philanthropic program focused on strengthening student success and workforce readiness.

On September 8th, 2009, the kick-off documentary, Get Schooled: You Have the Right, aired simultaneously and commercial-free on all Viacom networks, including Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1, BET, CMT, Comedy Central, and SPIKE TV.

The 30-minute documentary highlighted the education challenges, life choices and breakthroughs experienced by three professionals who provide critical support to President Barack Obama, Kelly Clarkson and LeBron James. President Obama, Clarkson and James were featured in the show alongside their trusted professional colleagues who work behind-the-scenes but have equally inspiring personal stories and are successes in their own right.

Click here to view the documentary.

For more information visit: www.getschooled.com

Why AT&T Is Investing in Education

Because U.S. education issues demand action:

• Far too many students are dropping out of U.S. high schools.
  • More than 1 million students drop out each year — one student every 26 seconds.
  • Nearly one-third of all public high school students fail to graduate — and the rate jumps to one-half for African-American, Hispanic and Native American students.
  • Dropouts are far more likely than high school graduates to be unemployed, living in poverty, in poor health or incarcerated.

Because the implications for AT&T and the U.S. economy are serious:

• The nation's educational and workforce readiness crisis is one of the greatest long-term challenges facing AT&T and the U.S. economy.
• Students unprepared to enter college and the workforce cost the U.S. economy more than $3.7 billion annually in lost wages and remedial educational costs.
• The 1.2 million students who should have graduated in 2007 but didn't will cost the nation nearly $329 billion in lost income over the course of their lifetimes.