TUSD Has Lowest Dropout Rate In 5 Years, Credits Steps To Success

TUCSON, AZ – In a media briefing Tuesday, Dr. Gabriel Trujillo, Tucson Unified School District superintendent, said the district’s rate of student loss on the 15th day of the school year last week was significantly lower than in recent years. “We have experienced a dramatic and more pronounced reduction in the loss of students than we have seen over the last five years,” he said. The losses he referred to were 302 students for this year on day 15, as compared to last year’s loss of 1,452 students on the same day. The district’s Steps to Success was credited by Trujillo as being a primary reason.

In Steps to Success, which began in 2014, community members and TUSD employees, counselors and administrators are assigned into squads. The first step is breakfast at the district’s office, then each team receives a list of 9th-to-12th-grade students who have dropped out. The teams knock on the students’ doors and try to convince them to come back to school. In the past, it was challenging to ask students to resume the same schedule that inspired them to drop out in the first place, according to Trujillo. But things have changed.

“What I’m excited about is [bringing] them back to different options,” Trujillo said. “Now you can go back and go into online instruction through our ingenuity model. You can go into an extended day opportunity if the traditional day school schedule isn’t working for you.” A credit recovery opportunity is also available for students who have left school previously, where students stay longer after school and make up missed credits in a computer lab.

Trujillo reports that Steps to Success has been effective. “We are seeing more and more students take the online learning and stay inside of the district. And I think that speaks to our enrollment loss reduction,” he explained. More than 1,275 school dropouts have received a Steps to Success visit since the program's inception, resulting in a success rate of "hundreds" returning to school. The initiative has also helped 103 more students to graduate so far, TUSD reported.