Alvernia University Bets $10M on Poor City’s Kids - Higher Education: READING, Pa. — On the second day of class at Reading Senior High School, teacher Eric Knorr directs his students’ attention to the banners hanging on the wall. Syracuse. Temple. Brown. Penn State. All of them brought back by former students who bucked the odds and went to college.
“You need to make sure you have a plan,” Knorr exhorts the class. “Because your plan will lead to a banner, OK? It will lead to an opportunity to go to college.”
Long seen as a way out of poverty, higher education eludes most students at Reading High. The public schools here are plagued by low test scores in reading, math and science; the school district has one of the highest dropout rates in the state; and, in a city where almost 60 percent of the population is Hispanic, many students’ parents speak little or no English.
