Tax-Credit Scholarships for At-Risk Students Extend Civil Rights

Last fall, I shared a stage inside a crowded Fort Lauderdale chapel with a young man who at one point in his life seemed destined for failure but rose to become valedictorian of his eighth-grade class. His name is Antonio Trigo, a student now at Miami Union Academy. As a child, he fought so often with his classmates that the grandmother who raised him was desperate to find a school that could help turn around the wayward boy.
She found a scholarship that helped pay for tuition to a school she thought would work, tuition that otherwise would be out of reach. Soon, the Cs and Ds Antonio had brought home in the past turned into As and Bs. He learned to play the piano and, by the eighth-grade, was testing two levels above his grade.