Dropout rate is slightly higher

Greater percentage quit in grades 9-12 in 2008

Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008

The St. Mary's public schools' dropout rate was higher than the year before and contributed to a lower graduation rate last spring, according to data released from the Maryland State Department of Education.

While more than half of the students who dropped out went to Great Mills High School, 38 were from Leonardtown High School and 28 left Chopticon High School. Also, eight of the 70 students at the former White Oak Secondary Center dropped out last year.

Leonardtown High School did improve its graduation rate by about 1 percent and lower its dropout rate a bit compared to the year before, but Chopticon and Great Mills high schools both went in the wrong direction.

"We are constantly looking for ways to sharpen the saw, ways to get better," Chopticon Principal Garth Bowling said. In addition to meetings within the school's administration team, school workers talk to students who think they may drop out and to their parents.

"We do take it seriously," Bowling said of the dropout rate. "That's one of our top priorities."

The dropout rate, which is the percentage of students who leave school in grades 9 through 12 in a given year, increased slightly from 2.73 percent in 2007 to 2.8 percent in 2008 for St. Mary's County.

That translated to 163 of the 5,820 high school students in the county dropping out last year. The number is still within the state's satisfactory standard of 3 percent.

"We move the best teachers to the most critical areas of need" and give them the support they need, Great Mills Principal Tracey Heibel said Tuesday. Eighty-nine students, or 4.45 percent, dropped out of Great Mills High School last year.

Heibel has hand-picked the teachers for new 90-minute blocks of English and math classes for freshmen and sophomores. She said the school will also start new after-school intervention programs that include academic help and bus transportation home thanks to a federal grant.

"We are continuing to work on [the dropout rate] at the ninth- and 10th-grade levels," she said. By putting struggling students into "tiers of interventions" that include the extended English and math classes, Fairlead Academy and the Tech Connect program at the Dr. James A. Forrest Career and Technology Center, Heibel hopes to provide focused help to each student early on in high school.

"If the kids don't get out of ninth grade the door is only half as wide … to get through to 10th grade," she said.

After an increase in St. Mary's County's graduation rate last year, the number once again declined in 2008 to 86.2 percent, or about 1.5 percent lower.

The performance standard outlined by the state for graduation rate is 90 percent; only Leonardtown, which saw a slight increase in its rate, was higher than the standard.

School administrators say they are working with individual students to find ways to make them successful in school and to graduate.

Evening high school is offered only at Leonardtown High School, a central location in the county.

Last year the program grew its selection of class offerings, though students must provide their own transportation.

Students who get a generalized education degree, or GED, which is accepted by some colleges and businesses, still count as dropouts by the state definition.

Evening high school graduates do not count toward the dropout rate.

jyeatman@somdnews.com