Compton Tries Innovation to Curb School Dropouts

Targeting children as young as 5, the Compton Unified School District on Tuesday joined with the private, nonprofit group California Tomorrow and three area colleges in an unusual, five-year experiment aimed at lowering high school dropout rates.

Key to the project, which also involves Cal State Dominguez Hills, UC Irvine and Compton Community College, is a sustained effort to boost parents’ involvement in their youngsters’ education through workshops, a drop-in center and, eventually, a “parent leadership institute.” Although educators have widely discussed the need for early intervention to stem the dropout rate, few projects have involved children so young.

Begun for Ronald E. McNair Elementary School pupils in kindergarten through fifth grade who already have been identified as probable dropouts by the time they reach high school, the project will be expanded within five years to all the district’s elementary schools. Eventually, the district and California Tomorrow officials hope that the Parent Education and Leadership Program will become a model for other school districts.

“We’re working on ways to close the gap between the families and the school system,” said Linda J. Wong, executive director of California Tomorrow, a statewide organization that conducts research and sponsors programs focusing on multicultural issues. The group is picking up program costs--$95,000 in the first year--through several grants from private foundations.

The first phase of the experiment is an eight-week series of Saturday workshops, beginning this week, for 25 parents of children deemed “at risk” of becoming dropouts. The workshops, to be conducted in English and Spanish, include training in such areas as parenting skills, legal issues facing low-income families and how to evaluate children’s academic performance. Free child care will be provided.

Project leaders sent notices, made phone calls and even went door-to-door to bring parents into the program. A Tuesday night reception to explain the program was expected to draw 100 parents.

Project Director Rhonda Trotter said a drop-in center for parents will open in mid-November on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. The center will provide referrals to community service agencies for help with such problems as job training, health care and housing as well as counseling for troubled children.

Beginning next March, the project will sponsor a leadership development institute for parents to help them learn to become effective school and community leaders, Trotter said.

The three colleges involved will help evaluate the program, track the youngsters’ progress and encourage the students to continue their educations after high school graduation, Wong said.

James Catterall, an associate professor of education at UCLA and an expert on the nation’s dropout problem, said the Compton project “sounds more comprehensive” than similar approaches tried in other districts.

He said that, while many educators have advocated starting earlier dropout intervention programs, few have actually done so.

Noting that it is “hard to connect with many of these parents,” Catterall cautioned that the program will need strong resources to succeed and must be scrupulously evaluated before it can be of use to other districts with similar problems.

With a dropout rate hovering around 30%, Compton is comparable to the state’s other urban districts with predominantly poor, minority students, according to the state Department of Education. Statewide, the dropout average is 22%, while the Los Angeles Unified School District has a rate of 39%.

The Compton district’s approximately 29,000 students are almost evenly divided between blacks and Latinos (49% and 48%, respectively). The rest are of Samoan or other Pacific Islander backgrounds, according to Deputy Supt. Elisa Sanchez. The proportion of Latinos in the district is expected to grow dramatically, Sanchez said. Furthermore, the district’s population has a high rate of transiency--some schools in the district had pupil turnover rates as high as 80% during a single school year.

Ask McNair counselor Mae Lockheart how she can identify the young children who are likely to drop out of high school and she ticks off a list of sure signals: poor attendance records, working below grade level, having trouble getting along with teachers and other pupils.

As someone who has specialized for several years in working with these children, Lockheart is convinced that the new program is on target.

“I believe that parent involvement is very important,” Lockheart said. “It motivates a child like nobody else can.”

And for parent Shawn Louis, who has three children at McNair and is a member of the district’s advisory council, the project offers the best hope of “seeing more parents and the Compton community involved. . . . We’re hoping to see a much brighter picture.”

BACKGROUND

School districts throughout the nation have been experimenting with ways to cut high school dropout rates, which are particularly high in urban districts. Some components of the Compton project, such as early intervention and increased parent involvement, have been tried in other districts, but many such programs have lacked adequate resources or enough evaluation to enable them to succeed or to be widely applied.