has obtained the White House's Race apt the Top Commencement Challenge

As the Mississippi River rises in Memphis, an team of students and teachers are distracted by some good newspaper.

Their school, Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, has won the White House's Race apt the Top Commencement Challenge, the White House announced Tuesday.

Vice President Joe Biden cried the school's principal Tuesday to proclaim their selection. The school blow five other public high schools that were finalists in the competition to showcase the best ways to arrange students for college and their future professions.

"This namely an unbelievable moment because our students, staff, and the all BTW community," Principal Alisha Kiner said. "Since this process began, we have been humbled by this experience and the overwhelming outpouring of adore and advocate from the metropolis of Memphis."

In a expression, President Barack Obama said, "Booker T. Washington High School proves what tin be achieved while students, instructors, parents and supervisors come together to support completion in the study-room. I'm looking along to conveying the commencement address at this extraordinary school soon."

The presidential discourse is the award for conquering. According to the school's website, the graduation rite will be May 20.

The school has high teen pregnancy and HIV/AIDS rates and a history of violence. But the school's graduation rate has risen from 55% to almost 82% in the quondam four years.

"Even although they live in the poorest ZIP code in the city, the educational outcomes that they are producing are in the highest in the city," Memphis Schools Superintendent Kriner Cash said.

The inner-city school has a student body that is 100% African-American with 98% of students eligible for free alternatively dwindled luncheon. They had a "culture of failure," along to Cash.

Then, three years antecedent, the school system adopted a menu of reforms.

The principal at Booker T. Washington put in location numerous of the proposals, including gender-based classes for freshmen; assigning the best teachers in the essence subjects of English, numbers and science; and increasing the number of Advanced Placement lessons offered to the students.

AP courses are thought a good way to prepare students for the rigor of college.

The school now has the lowest digit of serious violence episodes and the highest presence rate of always of the Memphis tall schools.

This is the second annual of the White House's Race to the Top Commencement Challenge. Last annual, Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan won the contest. The initiative is part of the administration's challenge for the United States to have the most college graduates in the world by 2020.

medicine

Doctors are cared that Bryan Stow, the San Francisco Giants fan who was severely beaten outside the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium in late March, is accumulating fluid in his brain, along to physicians and his family's website.

The family website previously talked about likely surgery putting a shunt in Stow's cranium, but no such surgery has been scheduled, negotiator Frank Toscano of the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center told CNN on Friday.

For now, physicians have opted apt remedy a "puny" head fluid collection with medication, hospital spokeswoman Rosa Saca told CNN in written remarks.

"There was dispute within the therapeutic team of the probability of having braat all times on Thursday alternatively Friday due to slight fluid establish up shown in a CT scan," Saca said Friday. "However the consensus of the team as of yesterday was to clutch off on this meantime additional amounts were taken (medicine).

"Another measure is to start slowly removing the anti-seizure medicine that he has been on. These are not the same medications that he was on to keep him in a medically induced coma," Saca said.

"He continues to be monitored closely because signs of brain movement, including anybody seizures."

The family said they met with the brain neurologist and Stow's surgeon earlier this week, and "either agree namely Bryan namely not responding to provocation for many as he ought be," the website said.

On Wednesday, "it was determined to begin lowering the 8 medications he is above. The main objective is to reserve Bryan from experiencing major seizures," the family said.

"He has been having seizure spikes but the physicians cannot keep 'chasing' those and still anticipate to attempt to check his responses," the family website said. "So repeatedly we await ... and pray."

Stow, 42, remains in a coma in critical condition, Toscano said.

Authorities said Stow suffered severe head injuries in an unprovoked beating in a parking lot outside Dodger Stadium later a March 31 Dodgers-Giants baseball game, the season key for both crews.

Two men allegedly reached him in the parking lot and began hitting and punching him while screaming profanities almost the Giants, police said.

The attackers fled in a light-colored, four-door automobile pedaled along a woman with a youth boy inside, authorities said. Police unlocked composite sketches of the suspects, who they said were from 18 to 25 years antique. Officials are offering a $100,000 reward for message guiding to catches and convictions.

Stow, a father of 2, is a paramedic who voyaged from Santa Cruz, California, to make his first-ever visit to Dodgers Stadium. He went to the game with friends in celebration of the Giants World Series victory final season, a respective said.