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Gift sees the poor in private schools

Alliance for Choice to allot $1.7 million to 800 students

Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 19, 2006 at midnight

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A philanthropic group will distribute $1.7 million in scholarships to 800 poor children - most of them Denver residents - allowing them to attend private schools this year.

"We're trying to create an opportunity for kids who otherwise have not been able to find an educational setting which allows them to get the most out of themselves," Alex Cranberg, chairman of Aspect Energy, said Monday.

Cranberg is the founder of Alliance for Choice in Education.

ACE has been distributing scholarships since 2000. The amount this year and the number of recipients are records for the group.

More than three out of every four recipients are in families that live on less than $29,000 a year.

ACE is not opposed to public schools, Cranberg said. Two years ago, he promised to pay college tuition for 550 students at Denver's Horace Mann Middle School.

But public schools don't meet the needs of every child, he said.

Middle-class parents can choose a private school or move to a different neighborhood, Cranberg said. Poor children often have only one alternative - dropping out.

"We don't want them to take that choice," he said.

Bianca Salas, 14, didn't get along with her teachers at Horace Mann, and she didn't get the help she needed with assignments.

"The (math) teacher would give me this work and say it needs to be in at the end of the day. . . . He would give me this, but he wouldn't explain it," Bianca said.

Now she's a ninth-grader at La Academia, a school in a former Methodist church that serves fewer than 100 students in grades six through 12.

Math is her favorite subject. The teacher explains it "to where I understand it, and now I know what I'm doing."

About 40 percent of the ACE scholarship recipients go to Catholic schools. But many go to "obscure but wonderful schools that are out there," such as La Academia.

ACE covers 50 percent of tuition, up to a maximum of $2,000 for elementary school students and $3,000 for high school.

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