Splitting up

With just 40 school days left this year, Fort Defiance Principal Larry Landes is worried that a half-dozen seniors are on the verge of dropping out.

“They only need one or two classes to graduate,” Landes said. “They’ve been in school almost 13 years and we are struggling to get them to finish.”

What administrators and fellow students can do to help peers across the diploma finish line — and the factors that make dropping out an option for some — is on the minds of Augusta County school administrators. A state report released this week pegged the county’s dropout rate at 10.7 percent, tops among the four area school divisions and higher than the state average.

At Fort Defiance, more than 19 percent of boys in the class of 2008 dropped out, compared to 6.2 percent of girls.

The new numbers have already sparked administrators such as Landes and Guidance Coordinator Ann McMillan to find out why so many at their school, especially boys, fail to get diplomas. But they recognize a mix of issues in teaching methods, discipline policies and mentoring will complicate any solution.

“We’ll be paying close attention to those numbers,” McMillan said. “We’re very attuned now.”

Dropout predictors

Last year, as a sophomore, Colton Showalter came before the August County school board for a major discipline infraction.

“They asked me if I want my diploma,” he said.

He said he did, but still ran into a year-ending suspension.

“I was pretty much out of chances,” Showalter said. “I realized I need to stay out of trouble and get this diploma.”

His situation, that of frequent discipline, is just one of a handful that educators identify as a predictor for dropping out.

“The biggest predictor is early low achievement in lower grades,” said Anne Gregory, assistant professor in clinical and school psychology at the University of Virginia.

Other predictors, Gregory said, are:

n school suspensions

n deviant peer affiliation, in which rule-breaking students become friends

n failure to form a bond with the school

These factors can snowball, especially with boys, who don’t participate in school activities, become disaffiliated and then find each other in the community.

“If you bond to school and feel cared for … you’re more likely to stay in school,” she said.

Landes and McMillan said they will be looking at discipline policies and how administrators interact with repeat violators. Staff members spend hours with “high-risk” students and their families, Landes said.

“You can identify high-risk populations,” Gregory said. “Dropping out is a cumulative process of disengagement building over time.”

“Any student thinking about dropping out, we know them pretty well,” McMillan said.

Why boys?

Senior Patrick Mackey likes hands-on learning, but he didn’t always find it in classrooms.

In vocational school, he did.

“I didn’t know I wanted to do computers,” he said. “I found out I’m actually good at it.”

During a recent panel discussion with The News Virginian, six Fort Defiance students frequently returned to the idea of learning styles to describe why boys and girls get disenchanted with school.

“Some kids do have to just sit there through a lecture ... That just turns into, they hate school, they hate the process of learning,” said junior Allison Bailey, who herself prefers lectures to the hated “busy work” of worksheets.

Variety is key, students said, and the teachers’ attitudes matter just as much.

“A lot of it has to come down to the teacher and how they relate to the students,” Bailey said. “There are some teachers who ruin it, and honestly, you don’t have any respect for them because of how they treat their class.”

Some teachers offer learning style surveys at the start of the year.

“Fifty percent of [students] say school is boring,” Gregory said. “Girls and boys become less interested in the content of school as they progress.”

But more group work, movement in the classroom, or projects that take students into the community could help.

“You’re recognizing that different kids are going to be engaged in different ways,” Gregory said.

For Showalter and Mackey, variety means taking a crack at vocational classes for part of the day, a viable option, said Lowell Lemmons, associate professor of education at Mary Baldwin College and former Waynesboro schools superintendent.

“Males and females get distracted in different ways from school ... going to find a job, having money, buying a car,” he said. “I think I hear boys asking more often about the relevance of what they’re doing in school: ‘Why do I have to know this algebra anyway?’ ”

Senior athlete Sara Wilkerson said school can become the last priority for some.

“We have better things to do with friends and we can drive,” she said.

Lemmons agreed with students that teachers should be moving toward a wider variety of activities and presentation methods, including vocational work.

“Change in education tends to be slow,” Lemmons said. “I’ve seen the pace pick up in the last 10 or 15 years.”

Before then, Lemmons said, change came slowly for girls seeking equal opportunities.

“Years ago, all of the guys were in the math, science, technology,” Landes said. “That societal impression has totally changed ... What we’re seeing now is girls outnumbering guys in some of our higher level classes … in leadership roles and clubs and groups.”

Hallway handshakes

Junior Alyssa Ricca has little problem with classwork, even if she doesn’t do all of it, but social relations turn her off to school.

“School is just so immature to me,” Ricca said.

She doesn’t participate in groups.

“Maybe there should be a miscellaneous club, where you do miscellaneous things,” she said, laughing.

But she knows she wants a career in criminal justice, and she needs to finish high school.

Friendships and teacher relations can matter as much as lesson plans, educators say.

“Does every kid in that school have a meaningful connection where the adult is actually doing some monitoring of that student?” Gregory asks.

Some schools post a list of student names and ask teachers to put a mark next to students with whom they connect. After all marks are placed, schools can identify disconnected students. Once connections are made, the responsible teacher should be kept in the loop on all discipline issues, Gregory said.

“Most of the students have one teacher they really like who really took an interest in them, usually more than one,” McMillan said.

Those relationships can mean staying aware of a student’s family life or simply spending more time in hallways and shaking hands, Gregory said. And these efforts should be integrated into classrooms, not separated into outside programs. Youth culture, for example, can find a place in science class.

In the coming weeks, Augusta County administrators will begin to look at the individual cases that contribute to dropout statistics. They will also focus on those students who want to call it quits this year.

And there isn’t a formula that McMillan, for example, can apply to all cases. Some students are simply tired of trying, she said.

“[You can’t just] say: ‘No, it’s cool, we’re going to have chicken patties on Monday,’ ” Ricca said. “You can’t talk them into staying, because it’s not usually going to work.”