22 schools called ‘dropout factories’

SEATTLE – In about 7.6 percent of Washington’s 290 high schools, 40 percent of the students enrolled as freshmen don’t make it to their senior year.

The 22 schools in Washington that researchers call “dropout factories” are spread throughout the state, but are found mostly in poor rural and urban school districts. Every comprehensive high school in Tacoma made the list, but none in Spokane or Seattle did. In Eastern Washington, only Cusick Junior-Senior High School in Pend Oreille County made the list.

Arlington High School loses about 30 percent of its population every year – and also gains a third – mostly because of transfers, but dropouts do make an impact, said Warren Hopkins, deputy superintendent in the Arlington School District.

Arlington High made the list prepared for the Associated Press by researchers at Johns Hopkins University using information provided by the U.S. Education Department. Thanks to improvement in student retention over the past few years, Arlington looks to be working its way off the list.

At about 12 percent of high schools nationwide, the senior class is made up of 60 percent or fewer of the class that entered as freshmen. Washington state is in the middle of the list with 7.6 percent of its high schools ranked by Johns Hopkins as “dropout factories.”

The numbers in the study differ from the “on-time graduation rates” calculated by the Washington state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction because the state’s number focuses on the graduation rate of students who remain in school.

Gov. Chris Gregoire disputed the study’s Washington statistic, then told reporters Monday, “but you know what? Any number is unacceptable.”

Tacoma schools Superintendent Art Jarvis also disagreed with the numbers, saying the rate is closer to 33 percent than 40 percent. He added you can’t just blame the high schools.

“One out of three does not make it to graduation, yet when we call a parent meeting we’re apt to have one parent show up,” Jarvis said.

Most of the “dropout factories” across the nation are in large cities or high-poverty rural areas and most have high proportions of minority students. Arlington doesn’t exactly fit that description: It’s a suburb of Everett, 87 percent of its students are white and nearly 20 percent qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches.

Hopkins credits two programs for the improvement in Arlington: the freshman academy and the link crew program. Both are aimed at helping freshmen and new students get a good start.

Students who struggled academically in middle school are assigned to the freshman academy for their four core classes, where they get extra help with their schoolwork and intensive counseling about how to succeed in school.

The link crew is a student-to-student buddy program designed to help new kids find their place in the building of more than 1,600 students.

Oak Harbor School District spokesman Joe Hunt contested the study’s method. Hunt said Oak Harbor High School apparently made the list because the way it counts the freshman class distorted the dropout rate. The school counts not only incoming students as freshmen, but also freshmen from the previous year who didn’t earn enough credits to become sophomores, inflating the size of the class.