Special Programs, Better Accounting Cut Dropout Rates

More South Bay parents are getting notes when their high school kids play hooky, and more of those same kids are getting writer’s cramp from lengthy assignments in detention classes.

The result, school officials say, is that more high school students who would have dropped out now are in class.

Dropout rates in most South Bay high school districts fell between 1986 and 1989, in part because counseling, anti-gang, vocational, incentive and monitoring programs are taking hold, officials said.

The rate also decreased because officials were more successful in finding students, previously classified as dropouts, who had transferred and failed to tell officials at their former school. Students are recorded as dropouts if they have not attended school for 45 days and school officials receive no request from another school for the student’s records.

Dropout rates for the Class of 1989 ranged from a high of 29.1% in the Centinela Valley Union District, where an influx of immigrants has led to a high level of transience in the student body, to a low of 1.7% in the affluent Palos Verdes Unified School District.

The statewide dropout rate last year was 20.4%. In Los Angeles County, the rate was 26.4%.

The general improvement in the South Bay mirrored state and county decreases, but even so, progress here was uneven.

Centinela Valley Union, the district with the highest dropout rate, reported the South Bay’s only increase--though it was only 1.4%. And in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the six South Bay high schools also showed no decrease, with their aggregate dropout rate of 23.9% unchanged from 1988 to 1989.

The most striking decreases occurred in Inglewood and Torrance.

In Inglewood, 31.5% of the Class of 1986 dropped out between the beginning of 10th grade and graduation. For the Class of 1989, the dropout rate was down to 11%, a decrease of more than 20 percentage points.

Inglewood has a number of programs aimed at reaching the students most likely to drop out.

Those who skip school or receive suspensions are sent to Project Hope, where they spend the day working on regular class assignments under a strict code of discipline.

“In a program like this, you don’t want to come back any more,” said Director Ed Washington. “You don’t want to sit in a classroom and write all day long.”

At Morningside High, Inglewood students involved with gangs receive counseling from Hector Torres. “I try to let them know that this is real life, and they can’t live in a cartoon world. When they blow someone’s head off, it’s not like the Roadrunner and Coyote. . . . I try to help them understand that without an education they are nothing.”

The district also encourages parents to visit school campuses during the day to monitor classrooms, help with clerical duties or patrol the campus looking for troublemakers.

In Torrance, the dropout rate fell from 19.3% to 6.3%--a 67.4% decrease that was the sixth largest in the state.

Delighted administrators at the Torrance Unified School District credited an “opportunity school” aimed at preventing ninth- and 10th-grade students from leaving school. Teachers and students in the program sign agreements about deadlines for completing class work.

Torrance students who already have dropped out or who cannot attend school regularly for some reason can enroll in an independent study program, said Paul Sittel, the district’s supervisor of child welfare, attendance and health services.

Under this program, each student spends one hour with a teacher each week, preparing a study and work plan. The student turns in work from the previous week for grading and asks questions about any confusing material.

In addition to tackling the drop-out problem, many schools also grappled with reporting requirements for dropouts, a problem particularly acute in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The problem involves students, who are not dropouts, but just move to another district and do not inform their old school.

Officials at Gardena, Carson and Narbonne high schools said this problem is particularly widespread in schools with substantial numbers of Latino students, many of whom transfer to a parochial school after junior high school. Others leave the country for family reasons.

“We’re 50% Hispanic,” said Narbonne High Principal Patrick Donahoe. “We have a real problem with kids who leave the country. We have never ever received a request for records from Mexico.”

Donahoe credited a vigorous effort to locate students assigned to Narbonne after junior high school but who had transferred out of the system without informing school officials with helping cut the dropout rate from 33.8% in 1988 to 20.7% in 1989.

This year, he said, Narbonne had 75 so-called “no-show” students in October that would have been recorded as dropouts. Efforts to find them “got it down to 10 no-shows,” Donahoe said.

At Gardena High, Ralph Butler, assistant principal for student services, blamed the “no-show” problem for a jump in the dropout rate from 15.6% in 1988 to 23.7% in 1989.

At Carson High, where 30% of the students are Latino, Susan Price, assistant principal for student services, agreed. “I know that accounts for a lot of dropout data that is just not correct.” The dropout rate at Carson High also increased, going from 23.2% in 1988 to 26.7% in 1989.

To reduce the dropout rate, Price said the school booster club now is hosting “big ice cream bashes with all the toppings” for the homeroom with the best attendance. In terms of fighting dropouts, “you might think that isn’t important, but it really is,” she said.

At San Pedro High School, where the dropout rate fell from 27.3% in 1988 to 18.7% in 1989, Joseph Orona, assistant principal for student services, said that he was shocked when he learned of the high rate for the Class of 1988.

“In the past, there wasn’t much emphasis on it. . . . When I saw the numbers, I started digging in on it. That upset me. I said, ‘There is no reason for that,’ ” Orona said.

“We do a lot of follow-up on our students. We have conferences with the parents immediately (after attendance problems) and discuss the other educational options in the district. . . . The idea is . . . customizing educational opportunities to that student’s needs. It seems to be working. . . . We call home. That helps. “

The dropout rate at Banning increased from 26.1% in 1988 to 32.1% in 1989. At Westchester High, the rate increased from 11.1% in 1988 to 13.5% in 1989.

In the Centinela Valley Union High School District, the number of students who dropped out of school grew by seven between 1986 and 1989, but that was enough to give the district the distinction of being the only one in the South Bay with a rising dropout rate. The rate grew from 28.7% in 1986 to 29.1% in 1989.

Administrators at the district--which has been embroiled in racial tensions in the last few months--blame poverty, changing demographics and a high transiency rate among newly arrived immigrant families for the district’s problems in keeping students in school. Between 1986 and 1989, the percentage of Latino students grew by 16%, and the percentage of Anglo students declined by 18%.

About 80% of the Centinela district’s students must work to help support themselves and many leave school before graduating because they are having problems balancing their jobs with their classes, Supt. McKinley Nash said.

“We’ve had to fight to stay even,” Nash said. “The fact that it (the dropout rate) only went up by seven students and one percentage point indicates that the schools are meeting the needs of this population.”

Many newly arrived Latino immigrants come to Lennox, Hawthorne and Lawndale--the three communities from where the district draws its students--to get established before moving on to other communities, said Jean Lukas, who is in charge of testing and evaluation in the district. Only 50% of the students who start school in the district every September are there when the year ends, she said.

As in Los Angeles Unified, many students who moved to other districts between 1986 and 1989 were counted as dropouts simply because school officials didn’t know where they were, administrators said.

In the South Bay Union High School District, where the rate fell from 6.8% in 1986 to 5.4% in 1989, administrators said a special program for ninth- and 10th-grade students has reduced the district’s dropout rate by more than 20%.

“We pull kids out when they’re having problems, and we work with them on their skills and their own self-image,” Supt. Walter Hale said. “We’ve identified staff who can help with any of a number of problems. . . . It seems to be working.”

During the two years the program has existed, Hale said, enrollment at the district’s continuation high school has dropped from a peak of 250 to about 125.

“We must be doing something right,” he said.

In the El Segundo Unified School District, the rate fell from 16.8% in 1988 to 10.2% in 1989, according to state figures.

El Segundo Supt. Richard Bertain attributes the district’s decline in dropouts to better counseling of students who have been identified as potential dropouts at El Segundo High School and the continuation Arena High School. He said counseling was stepped up in the last year and a half.

The lowest dropout rates in the South Bay were in the affluent Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District. The rates there declined from 3.3% in 1986 to 1.7% in 1989. Spokeswoman Nancy Mahr said one reason for the reduction “is undoubtedly due to the enrollment decline the district has experienced”--a 25.7% drop in three years.

SOUTH BAY HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT RATES Here are the dropout rates for high school districts in the South Bay. Rates listed are based on the number of students who entered 10th grade but had quit by the end of the 12th grade. Figures are expressed as percentages of student enrollment.

CLASS OF CLASS CLASS % CHANGE CURRENT DISTRICT OF 1986 OF 1988 OF 1989 1986-’89 ENROLLMENT Centinela 28.7 27.8 29.1 +1.4 5,658 Valley Union El Segundo 15.2 16.8 10.2 -32.9 684 Unified Inglewood Unified 31.5 17.9 11.0 -65.1 3,480 Los Angeles NA 23.9 23.9 NA 12,973 Unified* Palos Verdes 3.3 2.7 1.7 -48.5 3,395 Peninsula Unified South Bay Union 6.8 8.3 5.4 -20.6 3,125 Torrance Unified 19.3 9.2 6.3 -67.4 6,616 County Total 31.8 28.9 26.4 -17.0 State Total 24.9 22.1 20.4 -18.1

* Includes Banning, Carson, Gardena, Narbonne, San Pedro and Westchester high schools.

SOURCES: State Department of Education, school districts