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Friday, March 30, 2001
Personalized approach helps schools stem dropout rates
By Stephanie L. Jordan
Caller-Times

Denver Rocky Mountain News

Pamela Crosby presides over 10th-graders in an English and technology class at the Mind Center, an alternative school in Denver. She helps students with their reading skills.

   Faced with racial tension and a dropout rate in the double digits and rising, a principal at a Kansas high school turned to the students for help.
   Educators in Albuquerque’s Rio Grande area schools, where up to 40 percent of the students don’t graduate from high school, have created a virtual school to reach at-risk students and dropouts of all ages.
   And in Rockledge, Fla., school officials lowered a 7-percent dropout rate by creating a program that requires parents of at-risk students to meet with school officials at least four times per year.
   Around the country school districts have found a variety of successful approaches to help prevent students from dropping out and recover those who have, said Patricia Duttweiler, assistant director of the National Dropout Prevention Center, at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C.
   Among methods that have worked:

Decreasing class size.
Offering self-paced alternatives to traditional schools.
Holding regular conferences with parents.
Hosting tutoring sessions before, after and during school hours.
Establishing mentoring programs.
n Turning to students to help their peers.
Asking businesses to become more involved, stressing the importance of education to job opportunities.
   But coming up with a one-size-fits-all solution isn’t easy because the reasons and rationale for dropping out are vastly different, Duttweiler said.
   Components that contribute to successful dropout prevention programs are getting parents, students and the community involved, tailoring education for some students who have a hard time functioning in a traditional school environment and giving tutoring sessions beginning at an early age for those who start to fall behind.
   "Anything that gets kids involved and teaches them to apply what they’ve learned is good," Duttweiler said.
   She said teachers can’t stand and lecture for 30 to 40 minutes and expect children to be engaged and successful. And school districts have to provide teachers with professional development that will help them change the way they teach.
   The Mind Center
   Around the country, there are numerous examples of schools that have dramatically reduced dropout rates, implemented programs to prevent future dropouts and won national awards for dropout prevention programs.
   Fort Collins, Colo., a town of 110,000 about 80 miles north of Denver, doesn’t fit the usual profile of a school district with dropout problems. The community is 90 percent Anglo and has a strong economic base with plenty of high-tech jobs. But in 1993, 8 percent of the students in Fort Collins district quit school.
   The answer for Fort Collins was Poudre High School Mind Center, a combination alternative school and adult education center established in 1993. The Mind Center, which serves about 300 students each year, offers English-language classes, a night school, a GED program and a 50-student Sophomore Academy.
   At-risk kids at a critical time
   Pamela Crosby, a language arts teacher at the academy who helped launch the Mind Center, won a national award from the Milken Family Foundation for her work with the school.
   What makes the Mind Center different from other alternative high schools is its Sophomore Academy, Crosby said. The academy’s aim is to take students who have struggled in their freshman year - the year which researchers say is the most likely for students to drop out - and help them catch up with their peers. Once the students leave the academy they are integrated back into the regular high school.
   The Mind Center offers a ratio of two to three educators to 15 students, providing significantly more individualized attention than the students receive at the regular high school.
   "Students get to know the teachers here," Crosby said. "That’s because there are so many teachers and we take time to get to know our students. They don’t get lost here."
   Each teacher serves as a mentor to six students at the Mind Center. For each of the six students, a teacher gives updates to the student’s parents once a week, talks to a student about his progress and helps build the student’s confidence through encouragement and constant contact.
   "We do a lot of mothering," Crosby said. "Students, they need to connect. They need something that binds them. We’re all that way."
   ‘We Are GCHS’
   The high school in Garden City, Kan., had a 13 percent dropout rate when Kevin Burr became principal four years ago. He said surveys of parents in the community of 30,000 showed a low level of faith in the school system.
   Burr said 80 percent of the students said they didn’t feel safe at the school and 30 percent of his students moved in and out of his school each year. He said his goal was to make all students in the school of 2,000 - 49 percent of whom are Anglo, 40 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Southeast Asian - feel as if they had a stake in the school’s success.
   The district attacked the problem by first providing the high school with more staff. Then Burr turned to the high school students for their help.
   A theme - "We Are GCHS" - was created. Next, students were asked to contribute ideas for making students more comfortable, more proud of their school.
   ‘They worked’
   Students wanted to showcase their talents - for example, a student who played in his uncle’s mariachi band brought the band to school to perform. The students also raised $6,000 to purchase T-shirts that said "We Are GCHS"for every student in the school. When it came time to wear them, 95 percent of the students did, and they were photographed together outside the school.
   "Then one time they brought 10 markers to school and they had to write on the hand of a student and give the marker to that student," Burr said. "By the end of the day they were struggling to find students who hadn’t been written on.
   "These sound like really little things, but they worked."
   Administratively, the district began a program that broke the students into groups that interacted with each other, they hired a social worker, a truancy officer and started an automatic calling system to let parents know their children weren’t in school. And Burr won a national award from the Milken Family Foundation and was named Kansas Principal of the Year. The students won the University of Georgia Problem Solving Award.
   The Genesis Program
   The Genesis Program in Rockledge, Fla., began helping students stay in school by teaching them in smaller groups and requiring their parents to take a more active role in their children’s education. Since the 1995-1996 school year, 445 high school students have enrolled in the program and 312 have graduated from it, said Melissa Catechis, the program’s coordinator.
   Seventy-nine percent of the students who have been involved with the program have earned their high school diplomas. This year, 38 students will complete the program and be able to graduate from high school.
   Located in Brevard County near the Kennedy Space Center, Rockledge High School, which has more than 1,200 students, had a 7.2-percent dropout rate in 1997. Last year’s dropout rate was 1.3 percent.
   Students who are at-risk are referred to the Genesis Program and parents are required to meet with Catechis individually four times a year for a conference. Students can participate in Career Orientation Days where roundtable discussions are held between the students and people working in the surrounding community.
   ‘Students here take charge’
   Once students complete course work in the Genesis Program, they don’t have to come to class. Many who have completed their course work before the end of the school year have enrolled in the local community college and some have gotten jobs. The program also features an after-school program where students can either catch up with the rest of their class or work ahead and graduate early.
   "What’s important about our program is we only have 30 students in a lab at a time, the students get interaction with teachers and the parents are involved here," Catechis said. "Students here take charge of their own learning. Teachers are not dictating the lesson. Students have more responsibility on themselves to get their work done because they can pace themselves."
   Alternative paths
   Some programs in the country are just beginning to tackle the problem. Even so, they’ve had small successes in a short period of time.
   Linda Jackson, development director for the Rio Grande Educational Collaborative, says that her $160,000-a-year program has made great strides in helping students in the Albuquerque schools.
   Fourteen of the schools in Albuquerque’s Rio Grande area have a dropout rate of 40 percent. More than 90 percent of the families are economically disadvantaged and many students have to help support their household, Jackson said.
   The solutions include two new initiatives - Design School and Virtual School. Design School puts students who have already dropped out of high school into a class that teaches them leadership, math and science and gives them the option to test out of high school through a GED program.
   ‘Make your needs known’
   The four-week Design School includes a hands-on experience component. The school, modeled after an architecture class at the University of New Mexico, teaches students architectural schematic drawing, 2-D design and 3-D model building techniques. Students are required to complete projects as part of the program, such as creating an architectural model of a room using wooden sticks and cardboard. Since the program began about nearly three years ago, 500 students have enrolled and two have dropped out.
   When Virtual School, a computerized method of class work and studying, began in January, within days it reached its maximum capacity of 800 students, which includes dropouts and those who are trying to graduate early. Virtual School requires that a student go to the program’s offices and attend classes that are interactive, accelerated and self-paced, with instructors teaching over the computer."We really tapped a need in Rio Grande with Virtual School," Jackson said. "The only thing students can’t get over the computer is physical education and lab work."
   Some students find other alternatives to returning to high school, where they have repeatedly failed.
   "One student needed a fine arts credit so she’s directing a play at a community theater we have here," Jackson said. "Make your needs known and it’s amazing what resources are out there. But you have to ask. And ask. And ask again."

Staff writer Jeremy Schwartz contributed to this article. Staff writer Stephanie L. Jordan can be reached at 886-3724 or by e-mail at jordans@caller.com

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