Graduation Rate Here Rises Slightly

By Meadows, Robyn

Over the past five years, 10 local public high schools have bettered their graduation rates. But six have not.

Countywide, the average graduation rate rose from 89.6 percent in 2003 to 91 percent in 2007.

The state Department of Education released the 2007 graduation rates recently along with its annual academic report.

Graduation rates are always reported the following year, so the 2008 figures will be made public in August 2009.

A look at the 2007 rates shows county high schools with the highest percentage of students who graduated are Garden Spot, Penn Manor, Cocalico, Hempfield and Lampeter-Strasburg.

“I am extremely happy with that, and I would love for that to go on to a 100 percent,” Garden Spot principal Carol Kelsall said.

Manheim Township High School – considered a dominant academic force among county schools – ranks 10th, with a 93.7 percent rate.

“We do everything we can to keep students in school,” said Gary Yocum, Manheim Township interim principal. “Some kids just have it in their mind that come a certain age, they are going to leave school regardless of what everybody tells them.”

The high schools that come in below Manheim Township are Conestoga Valley, Manheim Central, Elizabethtown, Donegal, Columbia and McCaskey.

Pedro Rivera, the newly hired superintendent of the School District oft Lancaster, said that preventing students from dropping out of McCaskey “is one of our highest priorities.”

Over five years, the high schools that have made the greatest advancement in retaining students until graduation are Solanco, Conestoga Valley, Hempfield, Penn Manor and Garden Spot.

Solanco’s graduation rate rose from 87.3 percent in 2003 to 94.4 percent in 2007, a jump of 7 percentage points.

The schools where rates have not improved over time are Manheim Township and Columbia, Cocalico, Ephrata, Elizabethtown and Donegal.

“That’s great,” Solanco principal Gerard Rosolie said of his school’s progress. “We talked about what we could do to decrease the failure rate, increase the graduation rate and make their senior year more effective.”

What they did is make school tougher.

Solanco, he says, improved by increasing graduation requirements from 24 credits to 26 credits.

“This forces a student who may fail a class to make up that class at a faster rate…,” Rosolie said.

Public schools have many options in place for at-risk students: counseling, alternative-education programs, school-to-work programs. They have mentors who meet with students one-on-one.

Their challenge is to reach faltering students before they give up.

Rivera said many teens quit after struggling academically in ninth grade.

“If we can get them into their senior year, we lose very few students,” he said.

Yocum has been educating students at Manheim Township for 36 years.

The reasons students quit are pretty much the same over the years, Yocum said, but students used to drop out more often because they needed to work.

“Today, sometimes kids get involved with things that take their minds off of school…”

“They get so far behind that they can’t see themselves graduating.”

In addition to in-house programs, Garden Spot students who need a flexible schedule go to the Washington Educational Center, run by the Ephrata School District. It also serves students from Cocalico.

It’s been a “lifesaver,” Kelsall said.

Donegal runs its own alternative school called STRUCTURE. While it saves a number of kids, students sometimes are still not “picking up the ball,” high school principal John Felix said.

Over the past five years, Donegal’s graduation rate lost 5.9 percentage points.

But most of the change happened between the classes of 2006 and 2007.

Felix said there were 20 discipline cases in 2007 that led to some students being expelled.

Even with all of the programs and supports in place, schools can only do so much.

State law allows students to quit when they are 17. And at that point, the state can no longer fine parents if their children skip school.

Every year, as part of the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law, the state publishes graduation findings along with math and reading scores, and test-participation and school- attendance rates. The figures determine if schools have met what’s called Adequate Yearly Progress.

The state calculates graduation rates by dividing the number of graduates by the number of graduates plus the number of dropouts for four years.

To make AYP, a school must have a graduation rate above 80 percent or show meaningful improvement if its rate is below 80 percent.

Schools that receive federal money for low-income students but continue to miss targets can face sanctions such as being required to offer school choice.

But the real consequence of dropping out falls on the student.

Without a high school diploma, research has shown, a person is more likely to live in poverty.

But even earning a high school diploma often is not enough to gain meaningful employment and a livable wage, educators said. Most of today’s jobs call for some type of higher education.

(Copyright 2008 Lancaster Newspapers. All rights reserved.)

(c) 2008 Lancaster New Era. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.