Story Photos
 Photo by Dave Rubert R.A. Long students leave school after classes on Monday. Principal Andrew Frost hopes a new attendance policy will keep more students in class during the school day. |
R.A. Long on list of 'dropout factories'
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 7:03 AM PDT
By Carrie Pederson / The Daily News
Printable version
E-mail this articleWith only 55 percent of seniors graduating on-time last year, R.A. Long High School is has one of the lowest on-time graduation rates in the state.
It's one of 22 Washington high schools that John Hopkins University researchers call "dropout factories" because 40 percent or more of the students enrolled as freshmen don't make it to their senior year.
About 7.6 percent of Washington's 290 high schools lose 40 percent or more of students by the time they are seniors.
"This is not a new trend," R.A. Long Principal Andrew Frost said Monday, when the Johns Hopkins report became public. "Students who come to high school thinking they're going to drop out early on. ... We want to intervene with those students."
Early intervention is key, he said. "We're meeting with freshman students who have failed classes making sure that they are on track for credit," he said.
Frost also is putting a revised attendance policy into place this year. There was no an attendance policy in place the second half of last year, he said.
"We're going to reverse this trend," he said. "We're going to change student's expectations of themselves."
The district's alternative programs also aim to help at-risk students graduate, said Superintendent Nick Seaver. NovaNET, for example, is computer-based curriculum that allows students to work on course work at an individual pace outside of school.
R.A. Long social studies teacher Dennis Weber, who has taught at the school 32 years, said R.A. Long's struggles are in large part due to "gerrymandered" attendance boundaries, which he says are unevenly drawn so that the school gets a higher percentage of poor students.
"All you have to do is compare census maps with attendance areas. The biggest chunk of low income areas feed into R.A. Long.
He added: "When we hear talk about real estate agencies warning residents away from R.A. Long neighborhoods, we know that R.A. Long is put at a disadvantage."
There are plenty ways to help poor children succeed in school, Weber said, such as adding school hours and expanding elective programs.
"Art or music or drama, wood shop -- those things that are not strictly academic but give kids an identity with school and cost extra money," Weber said. "But its those programs that get nailed when we're emphasizing WASL test scores. You may see the problem compounded" by the need to get students passing the state's standardized test.
Researchers found the state's 22 "dropout factories" to be in mostly in poor rural and urban school districts. Every comprehensive high school in Tacoma made the list, but none in Seattle or Spokane did.
Seaver noted the Longview School District's poverty rates continue to climb. About 42 percent of R.A. Long students are below the poverty line, based on free and reduced lunch information. By comparison, 29 percent are below the line at Mark Morris High School.
"A lot have big issues in their life," Seaver said of low-income students. "Sometimes kids get overwhelmed with life in general and see dropping out and getting GED as an option." Students that get a GED are not counted in on-time graduation rates.
As in other districts, the number of students that transfer in and out of R.A. Long complicates counting students that graduate on-time.
At about 12 percent of high schools nationwide, the senior class is made up of 60 percent or fewer of the class that entered as freshmen. Washington state is in the middle of the list with 7.6 percent of its high schools ranked by Johns Hopkins as "dropout factories."
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Most of the "dropout factories" across the nation are in large cities or high-poverty rural areas and most have high proportions of minority students.
In Tacoma, where every comprehensive high school had a dropout rate of more than 40 percent, district officials did not respond to repeated requests for information from The Associated Press.
A Seattle Public Schools official couldn't pinpoint why his district managed to stay off the list of "dropout factories," but he had a few ideas.
Some Seattle high schools -- Rainier Beach, Cleveland and Chief Sealth high schools -- have hired dropout prevention specialists, who knock on parents' doors, talks to kids and work with law enforcement to combat truancy, said Ballard High School Principal Phil Brockman, who was the district's interim high school director for six months.
Several Seattle high schools have special programs to reach out to families, such as Latino support programs at Ballard and Chief Sealth high schools and the black achievers programs at four schools.
"When you have dedicated staff ... that's where we see real progress," Brockman said. He also mentioned on-campus social workers as a key to keeping some of the neediest kids in school.
Dollars for staff seem to be the key to dropout prevention, Brockman said, and that money isn't always available or is used for other things like shrinking class sizes.
He said he believes student retention may get worse, not better, in the near future because of an ever-increasing problem with drug and alcohol abuse and because 2008 is the first year students are required to pass part of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning to graduate.
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