What Makes a Student Drop Out of Junior High? : Education: Some students are afraid to go to school, while others refuse to. The number of dropouts declined last year--to 8,860 students--thanks to an aggressive dropout prevention program. Many say the number is still too high.
Through most of seventh grade, Geannia had been an average student, her B-average grades and attendance record providing no hint of problems to come. But then, within only a few months, things changed.
After a fight, Geannia Workman was transferred to another school, and the pretty, blonde 15-year-old from Sylmar began opting for the beach instead of classes. Soon, she was a regular attendee at “ditching parties,” groups of up to 80 junior high students that meet during the day in working parents’ homes. By the end of eighth grade, over the protestations of her single mother, Geannia had dropped out of school. “I got yelled at, but she couldn’t make me go,” she said. “I felt it was my life. I thought I could run it like I wanted.”
It was a distinction of sorts, having been thrown out of 10 different junior high schools for fighting by the time he was in eighth grade. But the streak ended for Jose, a husky 15-year-old student from El Salvador, when he shoved a Canoga Park principal who asked him to take off his hat in school.
“After that, I just didn’t bother to register for ninth grade,” said Jose, whose soft-spoken demeanor belies his membership in a street gang. Neither his unemployed father or mother, a baby-sitter with four children of her own, could persuade him to go to school. Until school officials tracked him down several months later, he said, “I just kinda hung around.”
Fifteen-year-old Anna doesn’t blame her parents for letting her miss most of seventh and eighth grades. She credits her fine acting ability.
“I’d wake myself up at 1 a.m. and tell my mother something was hurting, and she’d tell me to stay home the next day,” the shy, brunette teen-ager said. “Or I’d tell her I had a headache or that I felt like throwing up. She thought I got sick a lot, but she always told me I didn’t have to go.”
When Anna failed to show up at her San Fernando junior high school for the start of ninth grade, school officials, who were sent to her home, told her she could come to class or go to Juvenile Court. “I told them I didn’t want to go to school,” she said. “I wanted to find a job and be a secretary.”
Their backgrounds may vary, but educators say their stories are not isolated examples.
The dropout rate in 1986-87 for students in grades 6 through 9 was 10.19%, a figure that approached the rate of 14.46% for high school students the same year, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The number of junior high school dropouts declined to 7.40%--or 8,860 students--last year, thanks in large part to what school officials say has been an aggressive dropout prevention program. But many believe the number is still too high.
“Even that lower figure is astounding to me,” said Larry Gaines, an educational psychologist in Encino who works with students at high risk for dropping out. “You’re talking about 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds quitting school, and for what?” he asked. “Even tremendously depressed kids I work with, and the ones who are on drugs, are still in school. It makes you ask yourself what kind of kid today would leave school that young.”
Gaines isn’t the only one asking that question. Pete Martinez, district director of dropout prevention and recovery programs, said junior high school dropouts fit no typical profile. The majority come from lower-income, minority or single-parent families, he said, but no family is immune.
“The assumption a lot of people have when they hear about junior high school dropouts is that the parents don’t care,” Martinez said. “It’s true that, in many cases, there isn’t a great deal of parental supervision. But you also have some very supportive parents who just can’t handle their kids.”
One mother, Martinez said, recently called him for help when her 14-year-old son refused to go to school. “She said, ‘I can’t beat him up, and I can’t physically force him to go. So what am I supposed to do?’ ”
Workman, 15, who quit school in eighth grade and now attends an educational center that helps dropouts ease back into regular schools, said she, too, had a mind of her own. “When you’re in seventh grade, you don’t think very much about what’s going to happen to you later on. Nothing my mom said made any difference to me,” Workman said. “She works during the day, and there wasn’t very much she could do.”
A sampling of San Fernando Valley junior high schools shows that, while the degree varies from school to school, the problem is nevertheless widespread. Some schools, like Reed Junior High School in North Hollywood, had a moderate rate of 3.56%. Sun Valley Junior High School had a rate last year of 6.7%. Nobel Junior High School in Northridge, according to district statistics, had a rate last year of 9.68%.
“I can’t believe that,” said Nobel assistant principal Marvin Gottlieb when asked about the reason for his school’s high dropout rate. “You’re talking about more than 150 kids each year. I don’t know how they came up with those figures. I don’t know of one kid who’s not going to school.”
Martinez said students are considered dropouts if they have missed 45 consecutive days at the end of the school year, if they have left the school and no request for records has been made by another school or if “no evidence of re-enrollment is found.” Several principals, however, said the district’s system might incorrectly include students who have left the state or country.
State law requires children ages 6 to 16 attend school, and when all other efforts fail, a junior high school dropout ultimately is turned over to the juvenile courts, Martinez said. But before that happens, other steps are taken.
“Every case is different, and so you first have to find out why the kid isn’t there,” said Jewell Henderson, adviser with the district’s junior high school assistance program. If the school has not been informed by the family, counselors with the program go to the student’s home for a firsthand assessment.
Depending on circumstances, she said, the child will be given various options, ranging from independent study courses to participation in alternative classrooms.
In some cases, Henderson said, a student may have what educators call “school phobia.” Many of these students have been low achievers for several years and may feel there is no possibility of catching up with their classmates. Others may be intimidated by the difference from elementary school when they have to adjust to having several teachers and plan how to get from one classroom to the next.
In contrast to some other absentee students, Henderson added, school phobics often remain at home.
Anna, whose family of three sisters and a brother are from Mexico, said she never left the house when she feigned illness throughout seventh and eighth grades. Although the ninth grader is now receiving A’s and Bs at one of the district’s two educational centers in the San Fernando Valley, she nodded her head when asked if she thought she wasn’t intelligent enough for a regular junior high school. “I just don’t fit in there,” she said quietly.
In other cases, students may fall into the category that some police officers have dubbed “refusniks”--students who are brought to the front door of the school, then leave through the back. Some of them may be gang members or involved with drugs, said Officer Evo Novak of the North Hollywood Juvenile Division, while others participate in “ditch parties” during the day. Neighbors frequently call to complain about the traffic and noise, he said.
“Unfortunately, other than take them to school or to the police station, there’s not a lot more we can do,” Novak said.
Henderson and other educators believe that plenty can be done to reach these teen-agers, given the proper programs, enough funding and parental involvement.
To illustrate that belief, Henderson took a visitor on a tour of a bungalow on the campus of Olive Vista Junior High School in Sylmar. There, eight former dropouts--the oldest one 15--are bent over desks. Above them, tacked across the top of the wall, is a computer-generated sign that reads, “Ditchers Anonymous.”
“This month we’ve had a 93% attendance rate, and that includes legitimate absences for the flu,” said Ross Snyder, who teaches the junior high assistance program class. “For a lot of these students, that’s more than they attended in an entire semester.” Jose, who had earned the dubious honor of “king of suspensions,” is now attending the center regularly.
The classroom is one of two devoted to the program in the San Fernando Valley and holds up to 20 students who attend 4 1/2 hours each day. Students are of average ability, Henderson said, and have been afflicted only with bad attitudes.
Instead of focusing on the poor grades they will receive if they do not show up for class or do their work--threats that clearly have had no effect in the past--the class operates on a five-level incentive system, Snyder said. The more responsibly a student behaves, the more privileges the student receives. Parents also sign a contract, agreeing to contact the center once a week to check on their child’s progress.
Henderson and Synder recalled the day that Geannia Workman changed her attitude about school. After missing several classes and watching her unrestricted classmates go outside without her, Snyder said, Workman announced to the class that she was tired of being on the lowest privilege level. “She said she was going to level five,” he said.
Workman, who accomplished that goal within two weeks and is now getting Bs, smiled with the memory. “All the sudden, I realized that I could either end up as a bag lady, or I could do this,” she said, chewing on the end of a pencil.
“This sounded better.”
