ON TIME GRADUATION RATES WE CAN DO BETTER

On October 1^st, staff writers with the Virginian Pilot reported the graduation rates of schools and districts in the Hampton Roads area.  Suffolk’s on-time graduation rate for the 2009-2010 school year is 79.8%.  This means that we are successful with four of the five students we serve in terms of graduation from high school within four years.  This also means we have about 20% of our students who are NOT graduating on time.  

What can we do to help ensure that more of our students are successful in our schools?  Staff in Suffolk have already identified a number of things they are working on – better record keeping, after-school classes, and truancy and dropout prevention programs.  And that’s all good. But if we wait until High School to solve this problem we've waited too long.

Here are examples of what I would like to see to help ensure more of our students graduate on time.

1. Establish an accountability system that helps us with the picture of a student’s success throughout their enrollment in Suffolk Public Schools. 
2. This accountability system should help us identify students who are at risk much earlier than high school.  As low as kindergarten, make sure we identify students who struggle as readers and/or have poor school attendance.  Immediately put supports in place for these students.  Look for other markers as well.  We need to know who is overage in their grade levels.  We need to know which students haven’t yet been successful with Algebra by the end of the 8^th grade.  We need to know who is not reading on grade level K-12.  We simply must identify these students in order to help them.  And this cannot wait until high school.  We also need to ensure that all of our students can read by the end of the third grade – a marker for success throughout the rest of the child’s school career.
3. Increase the focus on literacy in all grade levels and all subject areas.  By the fourth grade, we should be moving from learning to read to reading to learn.  I'd want us to check our entire curriculum to ensure that we have systematically integrated literacy into all of the content areas.  Why literacy?  It's the key to successful learning and acquiring deep knowledge.
4.  I also want to make sure we don’t water down the curriculum for our struggling students.  This can happen unintentionally and often does.
5. Ensure that our professional development programs address the needs of our struggling students.  We improve in our profession when we are learning what we need to build a solid education for our students.  There are different strategies for different issues – and we want our teachers to have the best in their toolkits.
6. Place a greater emphasis on students in our middle schools, where early interventions are key to success in high school.
7. Make decisions that lead to higher student achievement for all students.  Support staff and administrators in designing differentiated schedules for students, based on their needs.  If we get a student in middle school who is not reading on grade level, then let’s make sure we give that student the time and structures to learn to read. 

As you can see, dealing with the graduation rate is a system-wide issue and needs to be solved in a district-wide way.