LHS hopes to find ways to reduce dropout rates

School officials had hoped to glean insight from survey results of Libby High School dropouts that would help steer the district’s efforts in increasing graduation rates. 

After talking to approximately half of the 120 students who didn’t graduate with their class in the years 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, they realized there would be no easy solutions. The former students had diverse and complex reasons for leaving school.

“The team that was developing the questions, we thought this survey would narrow it down for us, but it was all over the board,” said Kaide Dodson, dropout prevention and enrichment coordinator for Libby after-school programs. “There’s not just one glaring problem.”

Dodson and LHS Family Center Coordinator Kathleen Sheffield conducted the survey.

Some students had been doing well in school and loved their teachers, but a major event, such as pregnancy, caused them to leave. Others quit because graduating wasn’t a priority.

Dodson recalls a student who left school when construction was booming.

“One kid dropped out, made tons of money for two years and is now out of a job,” Dodson said. “He said every single day that he wished he hadn’t dropped out.”

They asked the former students what teachers, staff or administration could have done differently to keep them in school.

“They said, ‘It would have taken more than one person to have convinced me to stay,’” Dodson said.

The results discouraged Dodson, but they also enforced the direction the school board and the district’s principals have begun to take this school year – a holistic approach that looks beyond the schools to help kids succeed.

“What we’re seeing is we can’t fix the problem alone – it’s going to take bringing in the parents in the communities,” Dodson said.

Jael Prezeau, district curriculum director, said the district looked at how Missoula was dealing with its dropout numbers.

“It really takes a community to address a dropout issue,” she said. “We’ve just begun the process seriously this year with putting the family centers in the schools.”

The family centers work to bridge the gap between the schools and the parents and community, to get them involved in education.

LHS Principal Rik Rewerts said he has seen too many students drop out with the consent of their parents.

“It shouldn’t be an option,” he said.

He believes that schools have room for improvement, but also that apathy toward education must change.

“It’s got to be a community attitude that we address and attack,” he said.

School board trustees, the district superintendent and principals have been working on dropout prevention since three years ago when graduation numbers fell below 80 percent, the standard set by the Montana Office of Public Instruction to meet federal No Child Left Behind Act guidelines.

The school board surveyed the community and created a strategic plan in 2008 to prevent dropouts and increase parent and community involvement, Prezeau said.

The family centers came out of that, as well as the Parent Advisory Committee. The principals at each level – elementary, middle school and high school – created anti-dropout programs, Prezeau said.

Middle school children who do poorly in math or reading or have attendance or behavioral problems are already at risk, Prezeau said.

“In the sixth grade you can really pinpoint who the children are that may dropout,” Prezeau said, “and start to work on that before they get to ninth or 10th grade.”

The graduation rate continues to teeter back-and-forth between 80 percent, the minimum standard, but is still “better than the state average and far better than the national average,” Rewerts said.

If current efforts to reduce the dropout rate are working, it will take at least a few years to show up in numbers. When a sophomore student drops out, for example, it takes two years before it’s counted because that is when the student’s class graduates. 

In addition, the numbers can be misleading. Fifth-year seniors that didn’t graduate with their class count as dropouts. Every time a student transfers to the high school with too few credits to graduate on time, he or she brings the graduation rate down almost a whole percentage point.

There also is no provision for students who leave school and immediately pass a high school equivalency test.