Motivation, Extra Help Make Ninth Grade More Manageable: C-FB ISD: High Retention Rates Prompt Tutoring, Team Teaching Approach
By Katherine Leal Unmuth, The Dallas Morning News
Apr. 6–If freshman year of high school is a battleground, then Mary Gesino is serving on the front lines.
She teaches algebra, a course widely recognized for years as having one of the highest failure rates in high schools nationwide.
“Many teachers don’t want to teach ninth grade,” said Ms. Gesino of Carrollton’s R.L. Turner High School. “It’s such a difficult year to deal with. It’s such a huge change for the student.”
Freshman year has many casualties.
About 23 percent of ninth-graders in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district were held back at the end of the 2004-05 school year. This school year, the district started an initiative to improve the passing rate. It is placing ninth-graders in smaller learning communities so teachers can share information about them. It is also reducing class sizes and moving more skilled teachers to work with younger students.
“We know that if kids struggle in the ninth grade and fail two or more courses, they’re unlikely to catch up, and some of those kids lose hope,” Carrollton-Farmers Branch Superintendent Annette Griffin said. “They are the most likely to drop out.”
School districts establish their own rules on retention, but if students fail one or two courses, they typically are counted as freshmen a second year. In Carrollton-Farmers Branch, students are retained if they fail one full-year course or two one-semester classes.
In 2005, Dallas retained 32 percent, or 4,364 freshmen. Irving had 21 percent, Arlington nearly 24 percent and Lewisville 18 percent. That compares with much lower rates for Plano, at about 7 percent; Richardson, 8 percent; and Grapevine-Colleyville, 4 percent.
Statewide in 2005, 16.2 percent of freshmen were retained, with black and Latino students more likely to be retained than white students. Statewide Hispanic students had the highest rate among all races and ethnicities at 22.3 percent.
Motivation
In Carrollton-Farmers Branch, the new ninth-grade initiative offers tangible punishments and rewards for student performance.
Students who hit a certain passing average earn pizza parties and other perks.
“We see it as motivational,” Creekview High principal Cyndi Boyd said.
Freshmen at Turner who don’t turn in homework stay late on Fridays to do the work and receive tutoring from National Honor Society members. Creekview offers a “learning lunch,” where students report to a classroom to work during their lunch hour.
“The younger student needs more supervision and monitoring … but we have to get them to be independent learners,” said Ms. Gesino, who loves working with students this age. “I tend to be more maternal in my approach.”
Ms. Gesino points out that the same high failure rate is seen in college freshmen, another difficult transition year.
At Carrollton Ranchview High in Irving, freshmen must keep planners and have their teachers sign off on them.
Some classes are geared toward study skills and goal setting to help struggling students. Some districts also offer summer transition programs for students.
“The driving force for ninth grade is to provide a support system,” said Melanie Magee, assistant principal of Ranchview High.
Joseph Bustos, 15, a freshman at Carrollton’s Newman Smith High, often works on his homework after school at the nonprofit Bea’s Kids center in the Farmers Branch apartment complex where he lives.
“I miss middle school because it’s easier,” he said. “People knew me more than in high school.”
High school is bigger, he added, and it can be boring.
His 18-year-old sister, Jennyfer Avendano, is the center’s coordinator and a community college student. She pointed out that communicating often with her counselor helped her a lot in high school. But it’s up to students to care or not, she added.
“Sometimes people change when they get older — I had friends who did very well in middle school, but in high school they started blowing things off,” she said. “If you get good grades, they call you a nerd.”
Extra help
Beyond the motivational issues, ninth grade poses more academic challenges. Many schools give struggling students double periods in math and English. They also try to decrease class sizes in those areas. This year Irving High School placed hundreds of students who failed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills math class in a second developmental math class.
“The more we can do to give them a more rigorous curriculum and positive adult relationships will really set the tone for them to succeed in high school,” said Tracie Fraley, Irving schools’ division director for secondary learning.
In Carrollton-Farmers Branch, students are grouped so they share the same four teachers in core subjects. The teachers meet often to compare notes. They can also hold parent conferences as a group.
“The whole concept of family is sort of the best analogy — if I’m having a problem getting their assignments, is everyone having problems?” Ms. Gesino said. “It’s a team. And hopefully that way we’ll have fewer of them fall through the cracks.”
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Dallas Morning News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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