Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso ordered the city's high schools yesterday to try to individually track down the 925 students who have dropped out since January and get them back in class.
While students are legally permitted to drop out of school once they turn 16, Alonso says it's unacceptable that they're allowed to go without a fight. American schools spend millions of dollars each year on dropout prevention, but they typically do little to help students once they're gone.
"I don't want to be the head of a school system where 900 kids decide not to be in school and that's considered ordinary," Alonso said in an interview.
By Tuesday, the system is requiring staff at city high schools to place at least one phone call to each of their 2008 dropouts. By the end of the month, when the system's state funding will be calculated based on its enrollment, they must have personally visited the students' homes.
In a letter to principals, Alonso wrote that dropping out of school should be the hardest choice students can make, "not the easiest." Of the 925 students, he wrote, "We need to get them back - starting today."
Graduation and dropout rates are difficult to calculate because it's hard to track how many students who leave eventually get diplomas from other districts. But Alonso estimates that nearly half of city students don't finish high school. The state reported a 2007 graduation rate of 60 percent in Baltimore. In June, the journal Education Week published graduation rates for the nation's largest school districts using different methodology. It put Baltimore's graduation rate at 41.5 percent for the Class of 2005.
The state has not released 2008 graduation rates.
Under the new initiative, most high schools will be responsible for contacting 20 to 30 students, but a few have more than 100, said Jonathan Brice, the system's executive director of student services.
For dropouts ages 16 to 18, Brice said, the goal is to get them to re-enroll in the schools they left. About 300 of the 925 dropouts are older, 19 to 21. For them, the system will host two daylong resource fairs next week with social service providers on hand to address the obstacles preventing them from finishing high school, including drug addiction, lack of transportation and lack of child care.
