Boys & Girls Club High School Diploma Program: Nonprofit Starts Alternative Way To Help Students Graduate (VIDEO)

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

In attempt to reduce high school dropout rates, one non-profit organization is promoting an alternative way for students to receive their diplomas.

According to CBS Los Angeles, Boys & Girls Clubs in California have partnered with nearby Vista Real Charter High School to give graduating seniors a less traditional learning option. Teens can now take classes at Boys & Girls Club teen centers which will count toward their graduation requirements.

“Every student is different, and they learn differently,” Vista Real principal Corrine Manley told CBS News. “We’re giving them a safe place, relationships with adults that are safe, and we work with the kids one-on-one."

Watch the video above to learn more about the Boys & Girls Club's new program.

In addition to targeting dropouts, the program is also aimed to help students who learn better outside of traditional high school settings and who have fallen behind in their requirements.

While programs like the Boys & Girls Club are coming up with different solutions to help teens complete their high school degrees, some students are also taking their education into their own hands.

An after-school program called Minddrive -- a non-profit that uses electric car design to inspire at-risk teens -- brought attention to how innovative forms of education has positive effects on students. In May, the Missouri teens involved in the program restored a Volkswagen from 1967, engineered the car to be powered by social media interactions (like hashtagging #MindDrive) and used this "social fuel" to drive to Washington D.C.

Once they arrived in the nation's capital, they met with elected officials to talk about the importance of creative educational programs.

Back in March, students from Massachusetts also promoted a new kind of learning at their school. Select teens opted to participate in a program called the Independent Project, an alternative school within the public high school that's solely run by students. They decided and organized their own curriculum without any teachers or parents.

"I have dyslexia so it’s very hard reading and writing and doing those sorts of things. School has always been a big problem for me," one participant named Sergio explained. "If not for this program, I don’t know if I’d be graduating -- I don’t know where I’d be right now."

What do you think of these alternative learning programs? Tell us in the comments or tweet at @HuffPostTeen.

Also on HuffPost:

Get Alerts

Wisconsin Nonprofit Journalism Center Targeted For Eviction By Republican Lawmakers (VIDEO)

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is facing a state GOP effort to kick it out of its offices at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.

In the early morning hours of June 5, the Joint Finance Committee in the Wisconsin Assembly approved a provision that would kick the WCIJ out of its two offices on the UW-Madison campus and prevent staff at the university from working there. It passed along party lines less than an hour after a reporter broke the news about the provision on Twitter, and was included with a number of controversial provisions in an omnibus bill.

The WCIJ has used two offices on campus to house four professional staffers and four interns since it launched in 2009, according to the Journal-Sentinel, and receives no government money. Its $400,000 annual budget is funded by private foundations, individuals and news organizations, and the WCIJ allows media outlets around the country to publish its articles. The center spends $40,000 a year paying student interns at $10 an hour, Andy Hall, the WCIJ's executive director, told the Journal-Sentinel.

Although the provision was only backed by GOP lawmakers, not all Republicans support the legislation.

"It is the height of arrogance, and everybody who voted for that should be embarrassed," state Sen. Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center) said in an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio, according to the WCIJ-produced WisconsinWatch.org. "It smacks of the kind of tactics you would expect from Vladmir Putin or Hugo Chavez -- not in Wisconsin."

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said he believes the center has a liberal bias in its reporting, according to the Journal-Sentinel, but conservative Milwaukee radio host Charlie Sykes called the provision "petty, vindictive and dumb."

Vos and state Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette), co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee, declined to say who came up with the provision targeting the WCIJ when asked by reporters in a press conference last week. Both Vos and Nygren did not return requests for comment by The Huffington Post.

Greg Downey, director of the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at UW-Madison, defended the office spaces on the school's website, saying they were a small price to pay for "regular, guaranteed, paid internships for our students" and "ready access to highly-respected investigative reporters." Downey said the university must oppose what he described as a "direct assault on our academic freedom in research, teaching, and service."

The provisions to evict the WCIJ and bar faculty from collaborating with them "would harm our research, teaching, and service mission," Downey wrote.

Gary Sandefur, dean of UW's College of Letters & Science, is also on record opposing the provision, calling it "legislative micromanagement and overreach at its worst."

Magda Konieczna, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison, insisted in an article at the Nieman Journalism Lab that pushing the center off campus would represent a loss for the future of journalism:

And so the state legislature’s affront on the center is more than a problem of academic freedom and student teaching. The center is one hopeful model of the journalistic institution of the future. But journalism needs to be independent, and the state legislature’s desire — and apparent ability — to reach into the university poses a particularly tricky problem for those who have felt hopeful about this model of doing journalism. It also violates a century of innovation and collaboration between journalism and the university, one that helped form the character of both institutions in this state.

Andy Hall, the center's executive director, told Romenesko they were "blindsided" by the provision, but said he received an immense number of letters of support from journalists and journalism educators around the country. The center is planning to push for lawmakers to remove the provision, according to its website.