18-year-old Claudia Alfaro is a high school senior, a single mother, and a future accountant. The Greer High School student says she'd be a dropout without the advice and attention of her coach.
Her younger brother Mario is a freshman at Greer. He has the same coach and says he planned to quit school next year but "Coach" talked him into better grades.
That "Coach" met both students through a program called "Graduate Greenville", and soon she's the one who will drop out of school.
Karla Birkel is one of five mentors placed in Greenville County Schools to identify, challenge, and guide at-risk students from 9th grade to graduation.
"We target them in the 8th grade," Birkel said. "Those who will respond to what we do with this program."
Now, because the entities which fund her program are coming up short on funds, "I will no longer have a job and they will no longer have a coach," she said.
Graduate Greenville is funded by private donations. That money is moved through a group called Public Education Partners. Executive Director Grier Mullins said the board of directors had already notified coaches and staff that the in-school program would be cancelled for the next school year.
Coaches have been in Greer, Travelers Rest, Southside, Greenville and Berea High Schools.
"We aren't heroes, we don't save them all," said Travelers Rest coach Drew Perry, "in some cases a student and myself really click and we can make it happen."
"It" is graduation.
Students who enter the program are identified as potential dropouts in the 8th grade. Each coach then admitted about 30 students as 9th graders. This year, the program claims there are nearly 30 students about to graduate who would have dropped out without the individual counseling.
Claudia, and her brother Mario, both said the program kept them in school.
"I had a hard time because when I met (Birkel) I was pregnant," Alfaro said. "I probably would have dropped out. I wanted to run away from my house."
Mullins said the program is $80 thousand dollars shy of the funding needed for another year.
She said people who wanted to help could call her office at (864) 233-4133.
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