Kansas City, Mo. ? Luis Mora is on target to graduate this spring. But the 18-year-old has seen many of his friends drop out from his high school in the Kansas City, Kan., school district.

“I wonder why they drop out,” the Wyandotte High School student said. “It’s their last years, and they’re leaving. They’re going to jail.”

It’s a fate that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other businesses are hoping to help others avoid with an infusion of $12.2 million into the Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., school districts.

Mora was among the students and school officials who gathered Thursday at a Kansas City library as the $5.2 million grant from the Gates Foundation was announced. Another $7 million is coming from more than a dozen other donors, including the American Century Foundation, the H&R Block Foundation and the Sprint Foundation.

The money, which is in addition to a $900,000 grant from the Gates Foundation in December, will be used to create better-prepared graduates and more of them.

The school and business leaders discussed the need for a stronger work force in technical terms. But for Mora and his classmates, it was personal.

“I’ll get a better job and be paid more,” Mora said. Research backs up his assertion, showing the average high school dropout earns about $9,200 less per year than the average high school graduate.

Boosting the number of college-ready graduates is a major focus of the Gates Foundation, created by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda. Since 2000, the foundation has given about $1.5 billion to support education – more than half of that going to improving urban schools.

“The reason the work is so important here is there are other cities where they have improved their achievement levels,” said Tom Vander Ark, executive director of education for the Gates Foundation, citing districts in Texas and California. “The problem is their graduation rate is still 50 percent.

“Kansas City, Kansas, is really the best example in the country of improved graduation rates and improved achievement levels.”

The graduation rate in Kansas City, Kan., was about 83 percent in the past academic year, up from 48 percent in the 1997-98 academic year. The graduation rate in the Kansas City, Mo., district was about 77 percent.

The new money will go toward several projects, including ensuring the districts collaborate on school improvement efforts, improving teacher training and providing more opportunities for internships and job shadowing.

The money also will help strengthen a program that assigns groups of students to a teacher who is charged with ensuring that the students graduate and have a plan for their future. The teachers meet with their charges weekly and talk to the teens’ parents regularly.

As the school officials mingled Thursday, a video played in the background showing the success of one mentor teacher, Harriette Horner, who retired in May after 32 years in the Kansas City, Kan., district.

All 19 of her charges at Harmon High School graduated in the spring, including a teen mother, several children of immigrants and a young man who began using drugs as his parents’ marriage fell apart.

“I wouldn’t have made it through high school without this,” said one of the students, Sean LaPoint. “It would have been over a long time ago.”

Vander Ark praised the program, giving it credit for some of the gains the Kansas City, Kan., district has made.