Plugging the Dropout Hole

All junior high school students face the universal adolescent anxiety of fitting in. In the Southland, many also face problems like persistent poverty, abuse, a new language, a new step-parent or their own new baby. No wonder so many drop out.

The junior high dropout rate was 7.4% in the Los Angeles public schools last year with more than 8,000 students calling it quits because of sex, drugs, alcohol, crime or because they were illiterate and bored.

Those dropouts needed help, but not enough was available. What is available reaches only a lucky few. The state spends more than $12 million to keep high-risk students in school, primarily in urban school districts like Los Angeles and Santa Ana in Orange County, but that is only enough money to reach hundreds of students when the need is in the tens of thousands.

The Los Angeles Unified School District supplements state funding of nearly $1 million per year with an additional $400,000, enough to help an average of only 100 students on 32 campuses.

Motivating students who are at risk is expensive but worthwhile. The schools involved in the state dropout effort have been effective in reducing dropout rates, increasing attendance and improving academic achievement, according to a preliminary evaluation completed last week.

Helping more youngsters on the verge of dropping out is just one aspect of the problem. More must be done at the start of the education process to keep students from reaching that point. Early efforts must be made to help youngsters form good habits. Take something as simple as paying closer attention to a student’s attendance record. Perfect attendance is hard to achieve. Only one pupil out of four in the kindergarten classes at Garvanza Elementary School in Highland Park came close in any given month last year. The poor showing prompted the dropout prevention counselor to bring a thermometer to school and teach kindergarten pupils to stay home only when they are sick, not when they want to go shopping with a parent. Attendance improved. Nearly one-third attended school every day last month. Such early intervention is essential because problems that start in elementary school can exacerbate in junior high.

To overcome another problem--the switch from the small pond of elementary school to the ocean of junior high campuses--El Sereno Junior High in northeast Los Angeles has grouped together 97 seventh-graders to form what is in effect a school within a school. Within the comfortable confines of the small group, the students get to know their teachers and classmates; their teachers get to know them. After one year, the close-knit group tends to have slightly better grades and a better outlook about school, solid antidotes to the temptation to drop out.

El Sereno and other schools with dropout programs can refer failing youngsters to a student study team. The team, which includes parents, counselors and teachers, tries to correct mistakes without blaming the child. No meeting begins with a scolding. Each session begins with a look at a potential dropout’s strengths, which are not always obvious.

Junior high students often need close attention simply because they are at a difficult stage. They rarely get it. Special dropout programs are providing that attention for students at a few schools in Los Angeles. An expanded state dropout program would give even more youngsters a chance, a goal that Gov. George Deukmejian and the Legislature should put high on their agendas for 1990.