Great Mills graduation rate drops

One in four don't earn diplomas four years after starting high school

Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009

About one in four students from the class of 2009 dropped out of high school sometime during the last four years at Great Mills. Graduation rates for Leonardtown and Chopticon high schools were higher at about 90 percent.

"It's not where we want to be," Principal Tracey Heibel said. "This was a huge disappointment, it was, for everybody."

School staff will continue with interventions and identify at-risk students to help them stay in school and succeed, she said. The school has improved in academic indicators, including pass rates on the High School Assessments.

While the data is disappointing, Heibel said that some of those students, including 14 of the 34 who were identified as dropping out their senior year, did go to summer school and earn diplomas.

Scott Smith, director of secondary instruction, administration and school improvement, said that he and school administrators are aggressively tackling the high retention rate at Great Mills High School, where for the last two years one in five students have failed ninth grade. Once a student is told to repeat a grade, Smith said, the chances of dropping out altogether increase dramatically.

A new after-school program called Twilight School is aimed at stemming that problem. Students at each high school who have a failing grade at the end of the first marking period in English, math, science or social studies class will be given the opportunity to take part in the program and recover their grade.

Smith said this allows more students to have a passing grade at the end of the semester, which will help students be promoted and give more incentive to stay in school. "That's the basic problem we had at Great Mills High School. We weren't moving kids from ninth to 10th to 11th to 12th grade," Smith said.

Great Mills High School continued a four-year decline in its graduation rate, reaching a 12-year low at about 76 percent. Eighty-eight students who would have been members of the Great Mills class of 2009 did not walk on the stage to receive their diplomas because they dropped out sometime during high school, according to state data.

"We've known that number was coming for a while … We lost one-quarter of the graduating class, students who should have graduated from Great Mills High School" last spring, Smith said.

Some administrators and other staff at Great Mills have been replaced, including a new counselor, he said.

Fairlead Academy and Tech Connect have been in place for one and two years now and will begin to positively impact the graduation rate, he said. Each school now has 90-minute blocks of English and math classes for freshmen and sophomores who need extra help in those subjects.

These programs and others coupled with the new Twilight School will allow teachers to "intervene before [students] actually fail a course," Smith said.

Between 150 and 200 students participate in the grant-funded program at each school, which will run after regular school time for about 1� hours twice a week, Smith said.

Great Mills has had a program in place called credit recovery that helps students make up grades. Last spring 38 of the 41 enrolled recovered credit.

Smith said the school needs to be clear that there are no excuses "from every single person in that building and the community that it serves." Great Mills did not make what the state calls adequate yearly progress goals due to its low graduation rate, although it did meet all of its academic goals. It was one of four schools in the county to not make those goals this year. The others were Leonardtown Middle, Spring Ridge Middle and Margaret Brent Middle.

The overall graduation rate for the county last year rose slightly by a few hundredths of a point to 86.27 percent. The performance standard outlined by the state for graduation is 90 percent; only Leonardtown was higher than the standard.

In the three public high schools combined, there were 174 fewer seniors crossing the stage last spring because they dropped out sometime during their high school years.

jyeatman@somdnews.com