THE 41 black and Puerto Rican teen-agers who gathered at the Triangle Building in Harlem were turned out in their Sunday best. "Man," said one of the girls to a friend, "you look like you're going to a wedding." The ceremony that the group had come to attend had an importance all its own. A short while ago, those ghetto youngsters had been dropouts from New York City schools; now they were about to graduate from the four-month-old "Academy of Transition," sponsored by Time Inc. Almost all of them were planning to move on to the Urban

League's Harlem Prep, or Newark Prep, as the next step on their path to college.

At present, there are some 16 storefront Street Academies in the slum areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Under a program organized by the Urban League, and financed mainly by private industry, street workers search for the promising dropout. The shrewd, sharp youngster, who has seen enough of the dismal life of the ghetto, may be receptive to the suggestion that he can find his way out. After getting used to a routine of study in a Street Academy, he is sent on to an Academy of Transition for advanced classes and individual tutoring.

The graduation ceremony, which included students from the IBM-sponsored academy nearby, was a demonstration of the program's potential. Patricia Bernard, 18, addressed the school's sponsors and teachers in her invocation: "We've been given the impression that you all had only one big dream--a dream to help those of us who had almost given up hope. You boosted our morale and gave many of us the strength we needed to gain back our willpower to learn and our anxiety to make something of ourselves. I hope that each and every one of us graduating from here today will work toward success, and I hope that some of us will inevitably achieve it."

At the end of the ceremony, Pat Bernard offered a brief benediction: "Somewhere there's a place for us. I hope that each of us will go out and hold our heads erect."

Cover: Construction in casein by Louis Glanzman

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