Dropping Back In : Oxnard Keeps Students in School With Innovative Efforts

Perry Lopez has a simple strategy for getting dropouts to stay in school. Like a car salesman, he does whatever is needed to close the sale.

To that end, Lopez and his partner, Benito Centeno, hand out flashy black-and-gold business cards. They send postcards that resemble graduation invitations to homes of errant students. And they make house calls to meet with parents.

The result is a dramatic turnaround in the Oxnard Union High School District, where the number of dropouts has declined from 889 in 1986 to 229 students last year, earning kudos from state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

Lopez and Centeno are not just counselors but “dropout recovery specialists,” a key cog in the effort by Oxnard officials to convince lapsed students of the benefits of school.

“Students know they can come in and talk to us any time,” Lopez said. “We’ve even had some of their parents say, ‘Hey, can you help me go back?’ ”

As in other districts, an employee at the six high schools--the dean of students, attendance adviser or even the school secretary if need be--calls parents if a student misses even one class period.

But unlike many school districts, Oxnard also has a volunteer network of educators, parents and residents who meet once a month to talk about what they can do to chisel away at the dropout rate.

The group started meeting in 1985 after concerned parents asked the district’s Board of Trustees to find a way to lower the dropout rate in Oxnard schools, student services director Christine Smith said.

“We came up with more than 80 recommendations in one intensive day of gathering everybody’s ideas,” Smith said. “What took a long time was implementing them.”

The recommendations included identifying potential dropouts at the junior high school level, working more closely with law enforcement officials and hiring a psychologist for each school campus.

Another factor in the success, officials said, is diligent detective work and bookkeeping on the part of deans and attendance counselors.

Terry Tackett, dean of students at Camarillo High, has roamed neighborhoods, knocking on doors and reading gas meters for family names trying to find missing students.

“We’ve had students officially listed as dropouts who I have tracked to rural Illinois, or to parochial schools,” Tackett said.

District officials say some more creative tactics also have proven useful.

Postcards sent to 200 students last fall, for example, were designed to look like invitations to graduation ceremonies, imprinted with a mortarboard, diploma and “Class of 199?.”

The cards read: “Our school records indicate that you left our school district more than 45 days ago. . . . We would like to hear from you as soon as possible.”

“We located a lot of kids that way,” said dropout counselor Lopez.

One school, Channel Islands High, has an automatic phone calling system, nicknamed Robo-phone, that can be programmed to report student absences to parents.

At Oxnard High School, outreach consultant Avelina Coriell also counsels potential dropouts who are barely still in school, trying to motivate them to stay.

Each year, Oxnard High receives lists of “at-risk” students from its two feeder junior high schools, Fremont and Haydock. The lists for next school year include 200 ninth-grade students who Coriell will counsel.

“Sometimes I find I’m working not just with a student but with a whole family,” Coriell said. Problems contributing to a student’s decision to leave school include low self-esteem, drugs and physical or mental abuse at home, she said.

Oxnard High Principal Ruperto Cisneros said the district expects the dropout rate to decline further when a newly drafted contract between parents and the school district, called a “home-school partnership,” goes out to parents next year.

The contract, which will have to be returned with a parent’s signature before a student can enroll, says parents’ responsibilities include sending their children to school regularly, well-rested and with a good attitude. Parents also should become familiar with their child’s teachers, counselors and curriculum, it says.

In return, the district promises to provide a safe campus, a well-trained staff and high academic standards.

Bob Carter, superintendent of the 11,000-student district, said although the district gets state funds for its programs, the number of dropouts has decreased because the community helped tackle the problem.

“The bottom line to this issue or any other issue is, if you really want it to change, it will change,” Carter said.

Dropout expert James Catterall of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education called the decrease in Oxnard’s rate “phenomenal” but cautioned that comparing 1989 figures to those of 1986 may not be valid because the earlier figures were estimates.

District officials, however, said they were gratified by the state Department of Education report that showed the progress in Oxnard.

“We feel good that our efforts have been successful so far, but the fact is that we still have 200-some youngsters who don’t succeed in completing high school,” student services director Smith said. “That’s not acceptable.”