Success Stories

A One on One Relationship with A Caring Adult

Cornell’s father passed away when he was young. Growing up in a single parent house with nine siblings meant that Cornell often “went without.” His mother worked hard to provide for him, yet he still needed additional caring adults to help guide him as he approached the critical junior year of high school. Eric Jensen, his CIS site coordinator, became Cornell’s mentor. Cornell became very active with two Communities In Schools of New Orleans sponsored programs. The first was the Young Planners Network, which is a group of young leaders in New Orleans who seek to both learn new skills within the planning world, and advocate for young people’s representation in the planning process. The hard work of this group, and Cornell, meant they were able to secure two seats on the internationally recognized Planners Network steering committee to represent youth. Cornell was then selected by peers from New Orleans, Oakland, and Brooklyn to take one of the seats to represent youth on the steering committee of the Planners Network. Cornell was also asked to be the keynote speaker of the 2008 Young Planners Network conference in New York City in April 2008.

Cornell was also very active with the Youth Leadership Council over the past year. Cornell represented his high school, O. Perry Walker High School, on the council. The participation enabled Cornell to meet with and discuss issues in the city with Mayor Ray Nagin, State Senator Edwin Murray, as well as members of both the City Council and BESE board. Cornell’s leadership, combined with consistent involvement in CIS programs, led him to participate as a member or a panelist of the National League of Cities national conference, PolicyLink national conference, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Youth Organizing conference.

Cornell was elected President of O. Perry Walker’s Student Government Association. Cornell was one of two students at his school taking classes at Tulane University. He served as a peer mentor by co-teaching a freshman seminar class to freshman students at Walker. Cornell was also selected by CNN and Spike Lee to film and document his life as part of CNN’s documentary series. Cornell was featured in the series when it ran in August of 2007. In the CNN documentary, Cornell stated his aspirations to become, someday, “Mayor of New Orleans.”

Today, Cornell is serving in the US Military, deployed to Iraq. As CIS New Orleans’ first graduate, Cornell inspires us to continue to work with each young person so that they will have access to more of the CIS basics, and thus graduate from high school on time and prepared to succeed in life.