Eugene White

Superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools

"We’ve had to change. When you went to school and I went to school, we could afford to throw away kids. What I mean by that is, if you left school, we didn’t have to call you because you’d go down to the corner and work in the warehouse or work in the factory. I spent my first 19 years in education teaching and working in Fort Wayne. In many of those years, International Harvester was operating. We used to talk to kids and say, ’you need your education’ and they would say to us, ‘no; I’m going to get a job at Harvester’ and we would say ‘why would you do that? You need to go to college.’ They said, ‘no, my father works at Harvester and he makes more money than you do’ and they were telling the truth because their fathers did. But that plant closed and their fathers lost those jobs and, you know, when you depend on industry, it’s not yours. So you’ve got to get an education because that’s the only thing that’s yours. If you get an education, you can have some options and opportunities, but to get young people to understand that, that’s a whole new concept. We can’t throw you away anymore. We can’t let you go and, say, well, get a job at a factory and take care of your family and your kids will go to college, etc. That’s not promised anymore because those kinds of jobs don’t exist. So we’ve got to get these young people to see: you must be saved."