For a number of years, Alabama required school systems across the state to report their dropout rates as part of making the No Child Left Behind requirements for Annual Yearly Progress.Recently, the state dropped that reporting practice, instead turning its attention to the graduation rate.
But despite that change, local school systems are still keeping track of those numbers internally, and though their schools are making progress, local superintendents and administrators say their work is cut out for them.
Understanding the number
For 2007 — the most recent on record on the Alabama Department of Education Web site — the reported projected dropout rate was 9.76 percent for the state.
Two systems locally, Sylacauga and Pell City, come in under that number. Talladega city schools and Talladega County schools are coming in over the state average.
School officials were quick to point out the state calculates a dropout rate based on the number of high school students who are enrolled the first 40 days of school, compared to the number of students left at the end of the year, then that rate is projected over four years to get the percent.
According to Talladega city schools curriculum and special education coordinator Dr. Frank Buck, because it is a projected rate, the number can be deceiving. A school system with a dropout rate of 10 percent does not lose 10 percent of its students in one year, but one class could loose that many students over the four years it is in high school.
According to Buck, such a school system would actually loose about 2.5 percent, or 25 students for every 1,000, each year.
And contrary to what many people think, the dropout rate is not the inverse of the graduation rate, which is calculated using a different — and complicated — equation.
Though Pell City Schools Assistant Superintendent Michael Barber said as the dropout rate declines, the graduation rate generally increases.
Accurately reporting
School system officials universally said one of the biggest challenges they have faced since dropout rates came under scrutiny as part of NCLB is making sure they accurately track their students.
While a number of students do actually drop out and discontinue their education each year, many of the students who leave a particular school system should not be counted as dropouts, Talladega High School principal Darren Anglin said.
That would include students who have transferred to other public schools, students who have switched to private schools, students who are being home-schooled, students who completed their requirements early and others.
That can be particularly problematic in an area like Central Alabama where so many children leave public school to be home-schooled.
According to Talladega County Schools Superintendent Dr. Suzanne Lacey, administrators spend a lot of time tracking down all students who have withdrawn from school to see if they should be reported as dropouts.
Failing to do that can erroneously inflate a system’s dropout rate, which was often the case before AYP reporting.
Different systems,
different challenges
System administrators across the area agreed that accurately tracking and reporting dropout rates are essential for their schools to deal with the problem and, more importantly, to try to make sure more students stay in and finish school.
Each system is working to address the problem in a number of ways and all have met with some success at curbing student dropout rates.
Talladega City Schools
For the 2007-2008 school year, Talladega city schools had a dropout rate of 21.7 percent. While that number is more than twice the state average, the system, which had a dropout rate of around 23 percent for the 2004-2005 school year, has been steadily improving, Buck said.
“We’re making progress,” Anglin said, but added they are not satisfied with where they are and are working towards continuing the improvement.
If this year’s numbers are any indication, the system could shave another 3 to 5 percent off that for the 2008-2009 school year, he said.
Pell City Schools
When Dr. Bobby Hathcock took the helm of the Pell City School System, the dropout rate there was around 28 percent.
As far over the state average as that number was, like Talladega city schools, Pell City has made steady improvement in the past seven years — drastically so. The dropout number was down to 4 percent last year.
As impressive as that improvement is, it is at least partly due to improvements in tracking down students who have left the school but who continue their education, said Pell City High School principal Helene Bettinger.
By mid-August last year, the system already had around 70 students who were “no-shows” she said.
“We got on the phone and found all of them except three or four, who the state will be counting as dropped out,” she said. The others had either changed schools or were home-schooled.
In the past couple of years, the number has hovered around the 4 to 5 percent level, and Barber said that’s understandable since, at that level, two or three students leaving school can have a more noticeable effect on the dropout rate.
Talladega County Schools
Talladega County schools are reporting a dropout rate over the state average at 15.6 percent for the 2006-2007 school year, Lacey said.
But like the other systems, the county schools have been improving and are at a low after the rate jumped to 21.2 percent in the 2004-2005 school year. The most dramatic drop came between the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 years, when the system shaved off 4 percentage points.
Sylacauga Schools
In the last five years or so, the Sylacauga School System has managed to cut its dropout rate almost in half. According to Superintendent Dr. Jane Cobia, the system has send a steady dropout rate, from around 12 percent for the 2003-2004 school year to around 6.5 percent for the 2005-2006 school year – the last year she had the rates calculated.
The state Department of Education Web site had slightly different — but close — numbers to what Cobia reported. They show the rates starting to climb again in the last two years.
However, like Pell City officials, Cobia agreed that, once a system’s dropout rate falls that low, a fluctuation of a few students can make more noticeable changes in the reported numbers.
The roots of the problem
While the severity of the problems vary across the region, system and school administrators say there are some common causes for students quitting school.
Though there are other factors, Anglin said the primary underlying causes for most students who drop out are socioeconomic. Under Alabama law, a student is free to leave school at the age of 16 if they choose, and many quit to start work — sometimes because their parents need the additional income to support their families.
Cobia said that is backed up by the demographics in her system, where many of the students who need help staying in school are also taking part in the free or reduced lunch program.
Other students are not getting the parental guidance at home — all of the adults in the home work or are simply not around because of other reasons.
“That’s a huge factor,” Anglin said. “… If a student does not have adequate support at home, it makes it that much more difficult for that student to graduate,” he said.
Anglin also places some of the blame on the Alabama Graduation Exam because some students who can pass all of their classes may see the test as an insurmountable obstacle.
“We have the hardest graduation exam in the nation. ... It’s a whole lot different than it was 10 or 15 years ago as far as graduation,” Hathcock said.
School officials said students will also often drop out after falling behind in school or failing a subject.
“If a student fails a grade, they have a 40-50 percent chance of graduating. If they fail two, they have a 90 percent chance of dropping out,” Bettinger said.
Some students just fail to connect and lose interest in their education and don’t have the supervision or support outside of school to keep them on track, school officials agreed.
Finding solutions
Talladega City Schools Superintendent Dr. Joanne Horton said her system is approaching the problem from a number of different angles, ranging from early intervention starting in elementary school to counseling to bringing in recent graduates who are successful as part of Alumni Day to emphasize to students the importance of staying in school.
Other school systems are following similar multi-faceted approaches to curbing dropout rates.
“We have tried to find the hook to keep children in school and to make them realize the importance of receiving a diploma,” Cobia said.
Administrators said the first step is identifying students who are at risk for dropping out. Under state requirements, groups of educators, counselors and administrators at each school meet regularly, once a month or so, to identify which students are at risk for quitting and to formulate individual plans to help them.
Several issues raise red flags for educators that a student is in trouble, including failing one or more subjects, disciplinary problems, excessive absences, failure of all or part of the graduation exam and other extenuating circumstances, like problems at home, Lacey said.
Talladega County schools are even using an end-of-the-month subject-mastery exams to keep up with student progress, Lacey said.
All school systems in the area provide some degree of mentoring or one-on-one counseling, which is especially helpful for students who may be missing some of the support at home, educators said.
Such focused help and education can also be a boon to students who, either in class or on the graduation exam, marginally failed – those who have not mastered a specific area of a subject but passed everything else.
For teens who are having trouble on the graduation exam, the state is now offering a credit-based diploma for students who pass all of their classes and only failed a portion of the graduation exam.
School systems are also working hard to identify students who may be at risk earlier, in some cases as early as kindergarten and younger, so that those children will have a better foundation by the time they reach high school.
Cobia touts Sylacauga’s Even Start program, which is aimed the youngest children, covering birth through four years of age.
In fact, parents who are out of school can study for their GED while their children are also receiving attention from the program, she said.
A number of systems are broadening their academic offerings, like Pell City’s ROTC program or Talladega County’s planned technology problem-solving based classes, to better serve more students with a broader range of interests, including those who plan to go into the workforce right out of school.
All the schools are also taking a more holistic approach to dealing with the problem to focus on parental involvement as well as student issues.
“Education is a shared effort — from the home to school to the parents,” Hathcock said.
Cobia said programs to encourage parental involvement are essential to keeping children in school.
In fact, even though the Sylacauga system already has programs which do just that in place — including “Tutor me too” created by seventh-grade teacher Gay Coley to tutor both parents and students in math — an intensive parental involvement and training program tops her wish list of things she would like to have for her schools.
Pioneering programs
Aside from those common approaches, school systems are also taking individual steps to help these students.
Pell City school officials have a grad-exam coach and are encouraging students to begin taking the test as early as possible so they have more chances to pass and address problems areas.
Credit recovery, which allows students who have failed a class to make up the course credit, is also gaining in popularity. Pell City, Sylacauga and Talladega County schools are already using this program, and Talladega city schools are hoping to have it in place next year and have funding allocated to make that happen.
The rules for that program are very strict, but it does allow students who have fallen behind to make up the work, Bettinger said, “so they don’t feel so hopeless then.”
Talladega County schools helped pilot the program last year, and Lacey said, “I think that is huge. It gives students the chance to go back and master what they missed the first time around.”
Sylacauga schools are offering credit recovery classes after school to give more students flexibility.
Cobia also listed summer school as an option for children who are trying to catch up.
Pell City has relied, in part, on the court system’s day program, which targets students with discipline or truancy problems. The court-appointed program allows those students to continue school work at a pace that “allows them to keep up,” Hathcock said.
The STI program, in use across the area, allows parents to track how their children are doing in school. In Pell City, the system has been refined to the point teachers can leave specific messages for parents about their children.
Similarly, some schools in the area are relying on technology to automatically notify parents when their children are not at school. That not only helps involve parents in their children’s education, it cuts down on unexcused absences.
A number of local schools have partnered with Jeff State in Pell City and Central Alabama Community College in Talladega and Childersburg to offer additional instruction and dual enrollment.
That and distance learning labs, where students use computers to take classes not normally offered, help retain students by keeping them interested in school.
“Computer-assisted learning has been popular with students,” Lacey said.
Talladega County schools have added an enrichment period to help students focus on remediation in core subjects, especially reading and math.
Talladega city schools have taken a similar approach that is geared more toward helping students with specific areas of the graduation exam.
The county system has also had success with its career tech programs by moving them from a central location to each school, which Lacey said has increased enrollment in those programs.
Some efforts, like Lincoln High School’s dropout prevention counselor, who is focused specifically on curbing dropout and bringing students back into the education system, have been made possible through government grants.
Lacey said that program would be hugely successful if it could be implemented systemwide.
“On our wish list, we would have that for every high school,” she said.
Sylacauga and B.B. Comer in the Talladega County School System are participating in the Bridges Program with the Sylacauga Alliance for Family Enhancement.
That program, which Anglin said Talladega city schools would also like to one day take part in, uses a broad-spectrum approach to dealing with the problem by utilizing things like credit recovery, summer school and after-school, and similar measures.
Sylacauga helped pioneer the Bridges program a decade ago. It originally served only grades four through eight, but as students were “aging-out” and moving on to Sylacauga High School, parents expressed concern their children would begin falling behind.
“So, a couple of years ago, we bumped it to include grades nine through 12,” Cobia said.
She attributes the success of Bridges to the “outstanding staff,” which is made up primarily of retired Sylacauga school teachers.
Talladega city schools have also turned to the community for help, bringing in retired teachers to work with students who do better in “small-group” settings, Anglin said.
That School System has found success through remedial teaching materials from the publishing industry, which stands to gain from keeping students in school, Anglin said.
Horton said she thinks there are other resources out there, like church education outreach programs, that could come into play to help students stay in school and would cost the system little financially.
