i will tell you about one high school i went to a couple of .onths ago it was worcester tech in worcester, massachusetts. a couple of years ago, it was a failing school. huge issues, huge dropout rates. they have done many, many things to engage students in their own learning. they have a full-fledged clinic where young people are taking full-fledgedls -- veterinary clinic. i have an auto body shop, a culinary program, a fully functioning credit union where students work there and get paid to do that. the school has become this amazing community asset. not surprisingly, dropout rates, which were a huge issue, have almost disappeared. graduation rates have soared. we want to see more high schools thinking about how they link what students are learning during the school day to the real world. though students at worcester tech and other similar students -- other similar schools know why they are coming to school every day. >> the republican -- or the ryan budget cuts tell grants -- pell grants by eliminating mandatory money and reducing funding to discretionary funding. experts believe this

most of my research on my other books i went as far as worcester. [laughter] so anyway, i didn't really know quite, why i was going to hire a wide -- why was going to why but i went. it was a great trip. i was a or three weeks. it was in the documents i found in the museum library in honolulu. but what was particularly exciting for me was to go to the big island where -- it was really a process to find out exactly, he had grown up on a little village on the west coast of the big island, which doesn't exist anymore. the village is gone. i was able to contact some of his descendents, a collateral line because he had no children but he never married and had children. but yet brothers and sisters so the are a collateral descendents who very much remember -- in fact even the mention of his name to most people made in hawaii, they know who he was. they call him the first hawaiian christian. he is kind of famous. anyway, one thing led to another. i eventually was able to go to the slow beach on the southwest side of the big island which had been sight of h

her new book is called "i can hear you worcester.". i will tell you that when we heard my daughter's diagnosis, my first thought was who will ask her to the prom how will she hear her baby cry. lydia also panicked. then she heard about it. her son was the subject. 1-year-old alex just loves basketball and like any fifth grader who's good at it he studied his opponents' verbal cues even more so because he's deaf. >> sometimes i don't hear what the coach says and sometimes other kids sort of tell me you're doing something wrong and it can sometimes embarrass me actually sometimes. >> are there certain times that you know you're just feeling different than the other kids or hearing things differently. >> definitely. >> alex was born the third of three boys. his mom lydia knew something was different. >> it started at times where we would be reading "good night moon" a lot. and i'd say, alex point to the moon, the red balloon. he couldn't do it. i thought, that doesn't seem right. why can't he point to the kouchlt. >> reporter: at age 20