Area Schools Talk Graduation Rates and Dropout Prevention: Atlanta Public Schools
High school students that leave a district without officially withdrawing will count as a dropout.
Also, students that don’t receive a high school diploma within four years can’t be counted as a graduate.
That’s part of the new federal guidelines for calculating graduation and dropout rates.
Area school districts are either adjusting or developing how to improve the graduation rate and also prevent students from dropping out.
For this report, a look at what the Atlanta Public Schools District plans to do.
Some ideas work and some don’t.
But for APS the challenge is finding the right approach to improve the district’s declining graduation rate and at the same time decrease the number of dropouts.
Keith Bromery is the district’s spokesperson.
“We have a very real issue with highly mobile students some of whom move two and three times in the same year and often times the last thing the parents think about is notifying a particular school the kid is leaving.”
Bromery says tracking high school students that transfer out of the district will now mean collecting more information.
“What we have enacted is to have school staffs when somebody says they’re leaving, when they tell us, which school system you’re going to go to and have you already registered. We have to do our due diligence to call the school system and see if the person is registered.”
Meanwhile solutions to improving APS’ graduation rate will take more than asking a few questions.
In the 2010-11 school year, among Atlanta, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett,
APS had a graduation rate of 52-percent.
That was just a half percent higher than Clayton which was last among the group.
Under former superintendent Dr. Hall, APS developed Project Grad.
The goal was to graduate at least 80-percent of high school students and see 50-percent of those enter and graduate from college.
ProjectGrad is on hold says Bromery and APS is developing programs that will identify students in academic distress.
“APS has graduation coaches in all middle and high schools whose job it is to work with students who show tendencies of dropping out. Those tendencies can be anything from poor grades to attendance issues and behavioral problems.”
Bromery says the district is also developing academic programming specifically for those students.
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