District Officials Credit Early Intervention Programs for Drop-out Rate Decrease

Newly-released state statistics for the 2008-09 school year show an unusual trend for the drop-out rates: while county and state drop-outs increased from the 2007-08 year to the most current set of data, PUSD figures .

The school with the worst drop-out rates, and the neighborhood school for many Altadena students, John Muir High School, had a rate drop of almost 11 percent from 2007-08 to 2008-09, though the most current available figures still have it at almost 23 percent.

Some of the change can be credited to an unusually high year of drop-out rates in 2007-08, according to PUSD spokeswoman Binti Harvey.  But, at the same time, many are crediting new early intervention programs aimed at targeting kids at a high potential for drop-out.

But much of the credit should go towards a policy of being aggressive about identifying students at risk of failing, said board member Ed Honowitz.

"What we've seen is better systems in  place to ensure that we've identified at-risk students," Honowitz said. "The kids most at risk, who are getting F's in middle school, whose attendance is off."

Sonia Rodarte, the district's director of child welfare, said that that much of the focus for the district has not just been on academic skills but rather on behavioral problems.  Students who end up failing often start by missing class or by not engaging socially or displaying a lot of anger, or other social problems, she said.

To help deal with these issues, John Muir now has a full-time counselor working with potential problem students, and there are 10 interns in the school system from master's degrees programs in social work.

Rodarte said that she has seen some resistance from parents who don't like the idea of seeing kids working with counselors or attending therapy sessions, but she believes it is an integral part of intervening with kids before it is too late.

"The early system is about getting to [the students] before they really start struggling," Rodarte said.

Another option for Pasadena Unified students who get into trouble in high school is the Learning Works charter school in East Pasadena.  The school focuses exclusively on students who are failing their classes and are seriously behind in work.

PUSD board member Scott Phelps said he believes that Learning Works is a major factor decrease in the rate, as the school's first year was in 2008.

The school's head, Mikala Rahn, said the program graduated 42 students in 2008-09 who likely would have dropped out in previous years.  In 2009-10, where final numbers are not yet available for the district, county, and state as a whole, the school graduated 84.

The school's philosophy is to start by having direct one-on-one engagement with individual students which gets them to trust their teachers and tutors.  She echoed Rodarte's belief that many students have larger social issues that need to be dealt with.

"Most of these kids have been so not engaged by the existing school systems, or at home, that they just have never had strong adult role models," Rahn said.

A new state system for how to track kids is also a help in getting good numbers on drop-out rates and ensuring that no child falls through the cracks, said Gary Carnow, the district's chief technology officer.

For the last two years, the state has a more universal reporting system where each students gets a unique ID that follows them throughout their school years in California.

That keeps students from being mistakenly ID'd as a drop-out and makes sure that districts are getting accurate numbers, Carnow said.

In past years, students might switch districts mid-year and the school that ended up with that student would get credit for their graduation rate, while the other school might end up marking him a drop-out, Carnow added.

He said that he's more confident that the district's numbers for the last two years are accurate.

Keeping track of students has been a problem in the past, said school board member Scott Phelps.

"Some students would end up at a different school within the district than where they started off," Phelps said. "But we'd lost track of them and not figure out what happened until much later on...... so we're seeing an overarching improvement in our ability to keep track of students."