Challenge Day
A New Spirit Fills South Carolina’s High Schools
Challenge Day is an initiative to create healthier, safer schools through which adult leaders and students explore the unrealized possibilities for their schools, and develop strategies for making them happen.
Many South Carolina high schools are facing unprecedented challenges that have led to dramatic declines in academic performance, student safety, and graduation rates. However, the Palmetto Project’s five year partnership with the California-based Challenge Day organization may prove to be exactly the intervention these schools need.
“Challenge Day creates community among students of different backgrounds and provides them skills to support each other and make their schools stronger,” reports Program Coordinator Nell Killoy.
“We liked the Challenge Day concept because disciplinary incidents in participating schools decreased by as much as 60%, while suspensions declined by as much as 25%. Oprah Winfrey’s comment that Challenge Day could change the world was a great sales pitch,” she said.
Challenge Day has become an annual event at schools like Dutch Fork in Irmo, and Battery Creek High and Bluffton High near Beaufort. Other high schools around the state, like those in Greenville County, caught the spirit in 2010 and brought the program to the Upstate. The Columbia City Council liked the program at Dreher High School so much that that it provided funding to expand it to other schools including Columbia High and C.A. Johnson. Sumter High has also partnered with us in 2010 to bring the program to its campus.
- South Carolina schools have some of the highest high school dropout rates in the country. In some places, it exceeds 50 percent.
- In September 2010, MTV broadcasted a one-hour documentary on our Challenge Day at Columbia High School as part of its If You Only Knew Me series.
Contact: Nell Killoy nkilloy@palmettoproject.org
