The Reality: Daunting difficulties for the children promised college scholarships - The Washington Post

The Reality: Daunting difficulties for the children promised college scholarships - The Washington Post: ...In the halls of Hyattsville Middle School, where they enrolled that fall, Darone Robinson and his classmates still existed in an exalted bubble. They were the Dreamers, the kids adopted by Washington Bullets owner Abe Pollin and his friend Melvin Cohen for an ambitious social experiment, one that had made the students symbols of hope in their neighborhoods and beyond.

Yet, when they left school at 3:15 p.m. every day, when they weren’t lunching with Pollin and Cohen, when they weren’t traveling on their exclusive school bus, the Dreamers returned to communities rife with drugs and gang-related carnage. They went home to mothers, many of them raising families on their own, who were terrified that their children would end up dead or be drawn into gangs or the drug trade.

Already, the giddy promise of that day in 1988, when Pollin and Cohen announced the scholarships, had given way to a more sober sense of what was possible.