Bailey's Empowered Youth Programs Receive Another National Award

A UGA College of Education professor's group of mentoring programs, aimed at developing and nurturing academic and social excellence in all children and adolescents but especially in young African-American males, has been recognized with another national award.

The Empowered Youth Programs (EYP), created by Deryl Bailey, an assistant professor of counseling and human development services, has been named the recipient of the 2004 Multicultural Program Award by the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME).

The programs have received growing recognition over the past few years. This is the third national award Bailey's programs have received since 2001 and the fifth overall this year.

Last fall, Bailey was invited to speak about the programs at two important national conferences in Washington , D.C. – Double the Numbers: Post-Secondary Attainment and Underrepresented Youth sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the Carnegie Corporation of New York , the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation; and the Congressional Black Caucus' 33rd Annual Legislative Conference.

Bailey has been asked to participate again in a panel discussion at the Congressional Black Caucus' Annual Legislative Conference, to be held this year in Atlanta on November 6.

Bailey's program is one of six in the state to receive funding through a state Board of Regents initiative designed to motivate African-American males to stay in school and to steer them toward college.

While college-age African-American males constitute 16 percent of the state's population, they make up only 7.2 percent of the students enrolled in Georgia's public colleges and universities. Black females are 15 percent of the student population.

A task force, made up of 52 people representing colleges and universities, K-12 schools in Georgia and businesses, was appointed last year by the Regents to address this problem. The Regents signed off on all 15 task force recommendations and appropriated $300,000 to begin implementing them, including a $10,000 grant to Bailey's program.

The recommendations include recruiting more African-American males into teacher education programs, encouraging colleges to provide support services and developing mentoring opportunities between colleges and high schools.

Empowered Youth is an expansion of Bailey's highly recognized “Gentlemen on the Move” program in which about 60 Athens area elementary, middle and high school students, mostly African-American males, participate. Parents of the students meet monthly to provide feedback, receive support and participate in workshops.

Every Saturday, the students meet on the UGA campus to study and work on social skills. Faculty and graduate students from UGA and Clarke County schools serve as teachers and tutors for the Saturday Academy academic rotations. During these Saturday sessions, students are engaged in activities and discussions that focus on the EYP Top Ten Leadership Traits: respect, courage, responsibility, loyalty, honor, unselfishness, enthusiasm, initiative, integrity and forgiveness.

In all, about 150 Athens area students participate in Empowered Youth Programs, which now includes Gentlemen on the Move (GOTM), Young Women Scholars (YWS) and Parents of Empowered Youth (PEY).

“We focus on the student as a whole with attention to their experiences in school, home and the community,” said Bailey. “Our goal is to assist young people in becoming independent thinkers while becoming compassionate global citizens.”

Goals of the Empowered Youth Program include:

increasing member ownership in the community;

having a positive influence on the school experience of children and adolescents;

creating positive bonding experiences for adolescents;

improving interpersonal skills of adolescents;

decreasing dropout rates of African-American and Latino adolescent males;

increasing awareness and knowledge of other cultures; and

bridging the achievement gap for children and adolescents of color.

Based on the recognition that all students are not alike, Bailey and his Empowered Youth staff use a differentiated instruction approach to teaching and learning during the academic rotations on Saturdays.

“We use this approach so that students have multiple options for taking in information and makings sense of ideas,” said Bailey. “We want to maximize each student's growth and individual success by meeting each student where he or she is and assisting in the learning process.”

Bailey interacts with the teachers, counselors and administrators who are responsible for Empowered Youth participants, monitoring both their academic and social performance weekly with assistance from UGA graduate students.

Empowered Youth has also engaged students in regular community service projects such as reading and interacting with small children in the Early Head Start Program and Little Ones Academy.

Nationally, the programs have received the Group Work Practice Award from the Association for Specialists in Group Work and the ‘Ohana Honors Award from the Counselors for Social Justice. Statewide, they received the 2004 Multicultural Program of the Year Award from the Georgia chapter of the National Association for Multicultural Education (GA-NAME), and locally, they have been recognized with the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award from the Athens Area Human Relations Council and the Community Service Award from Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity.

Bailey will receive the program's latest award at the NAME Awards Dinner in Kansas City on October 30.

Monday, October 25, 2004
WRITER: Michael Childs, 706/542-5889, mchilds@coe.uga.edu
CONTACT: Deryl Bailey, 706/583-0126, dbailey@coe.uga.edu