For One Group Of Students, Good Grades = Kanye

By Marcus Gilmer in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 10, 2009 4:20PM

A group of local high school students dedicated themselves to working harder to improve their grades and now it's paying off in the form of Kanye West. For Highland Park High sophomore David Abrams, it all started with Lil Wayne. As he told the Sun-Times:

"My mom had on NPR, and they were doing a story on a student at Robeson High who didn't like to go to school and was failing a lot of classes because he just didn't try. As an incentive to improve his grades, his mom offered a ticket to a Lil Wayne concert," Abrams recalls. "I told my mom I thought a free concert might be a good incentive for other students."

Inspired by the story, David set up Students Helping Our World (SHOW), an organization that would use the reward of a free concert to motivate students to study harder and perform better in the classroom. Helping David was his mother, Wendy, who's the founder of the Cool Globes project which placed 120 artsy globes around the city. Though her contacts in the Chicago Public Schools helped get the ball rolling, Wendy insists, "the kids did all the meetings themselves." According to the Sun-Times:

To qualify for tickets, students had to meet several criteria put together by CPS with input from the students in SHOW. They had to maintain at least a B average or show improved grades in all classes, with no F's, and there also are goals tied into attendance, tardiness and misconduct.

When sending out letters to local performers for the concert, one ended up with lawyers representing Kanye West, who were impressed with the SHOW organization and saw a perfect match with the Kanye West Foundation. Now, before his concert at the Chicago Theater tomorrow night, Kanye will perform a mini-concert at soundcheck exclusively for students from the six participating schools who met the requirements and will then participate in an hour-long Q&A with the students.

While you won't be able to get into that, tickets are still available for his concert later that night, which is also a "Stay in School" benefit for the Kanye West Foundation.

Kanye West, Thursday June 11, 8:30 p.m., Chicago Theater, 175 N. State St., $49.50 - $500, via Ticketmaster