Schools Learn How to Keep Potential Dropouts In : Education: Most districts in county boast declining rates with innovative programs to reach out to troubled students before they quit, and to get quitters to try again.

Francisco and Maria Grueso had looked forward to the day when their oldest son would graduate from high school. It would be a day when they would beam with pride, knowing in their hearts that all the work and the gamble of leaving their native Spain to move to Orange County had paid off in a way that only a parent can truly appreciate.

But there were no commencement ceremonies for young Francisco. He dropped out of Garden Grove High School in the middle of his senior year. To the shock of his parents, his younger brothers, Andres, 17, and David, 16, soon followed suit. Then, 14-year-old Javier also began losing interest in his studies and teetered toward the edge of dropping out.

For the Gruesos, those were dark days, said Maria, 42.

“We were so upset because a person without a career is nobody. It’s better to go on studying for a better future,” she said last week from the family’s Garden Grove home.

But now, thanks to a Garden Grove Unified School District program that seeks to prevent students from dropping out and tries to bring them back to school once they do, three of the Grueso sons have made a renewed commitment to their education.

Francisco, 19, eventually enrolled in an adult learning center and earned a high school equivalency diploma. David is in continuation school and Javier, the youngest, decided not to drop out after learning from the experiences of his older brothers.

Experts say what happened to the Grueso family is far too common in Orange County. From Santa Ana to San Clemente, school districts are struggling to keep students in school and if they do drop out, trying to persuade them to return to the classroom.

The dropout rate for the 28 school districts in the county is 14.7%, lower than the statewide rate of 20.4%, according to a report recently released by the state Department of Education. All but Garden Grove, Irvine and the Laguna Beach unified school districts showed a decline in the dropout rate, which has decreased countywide by 25% over the past three years. Officials say the dropout rate is decreasing in part because of the innovative new programs being implemented by school districts across the county.

Many districts, like Garden Grove Unified, have taken the offensive with aggressive programs to keep children in school.

District officials are optimistic about a number of new prevention measures, such as the community outreach program that brought the Grueso brothers back to school.

Under such programs, outreach consultants track down students after they have been out of school for more than six weeks and try to talk them into returning. Other districts bring role models into the classrooms and hire social workers to work with students who have dropped out. Still others have programs that attempt to reach elementary school students and give them direction before they even have any thoughts of leaving school.

For the Gruesos, these programs made all the difference. After Francisco quit school and began working in construction, he realized he didn’t want to find himself “29 or 30 years old with no future and a pain in my back.” Francisco said he simply lost interest in school once he bought a car his junior year and decided he would rather do other things.

But his parents, who had left the Spanish capital of Madrid specifically to give their children the benefits of a U.S. education, pushed him to finish his schooling and asked the school for help. The family was aided by Rose Garcia, a community outreach counselor, who presented Francisco with alternative ways of completing his education.

Francisco is now studying electrical engineering at the ITT Technical Institute in Buena Park. Now older and wiser, he said he has seen the error of his ways and he hopes he is now a better role model for his brothers than before.

“What I did wasn’t right,” he said. “I thought if my brothers saw my example (of returning to school), things would change.”

Within the last few months, the Anaheim and Garden Grove school districts have hired a number of outreach specialists who, among other things, work with students who run a high risk of becoming involved with gangs or drugs. Other specialists concentrate on tracking down students with attendance problems.

“We are taking prevention measures at the elementary level and intervention measures at the intermediate level,” said Alan Trudell, a Garden Grove Unified School District spokesperson.

Cindy Tran was another student who, like the Grueso sons, followed a family pattern of dropping out.

To the 16-year-old Westminster High School dropout, leaving school seemed like the natural thing to do. None of her older siblings had ever graduated from high school. But after a couple of months of spending days watching television and visiting friends, Tran got a call from a dropout recovery specialist, who convinced her to enroll in an adult school.

“I think I’ll be staying (in adult school) for a while because the time schedule is good and it’s easier,” Tran said. “I didn’t like the long hours and going from class to class. I just got sick of going to school.”

Tran was contacted by Cham Nguyen, a dropout recovery liaison from the Huntington Beach Union High School District who calls, writes or visits students who have been absent from school for long periods of time. She works individually with students, trying to get them enrolled in an alternative education program and helps them find jobs if they need one.

The dropout recovery program is coordinated by Catherine McGough, who trains and coordinates six people to track students who have been absent for extended periods of time.

McGough believes such programs are valuable, but hopes someday there won’t be a need for them.

“We really need to put people like me out of business. We need to pump more money into prevention. We need one-to-one counselors, tutoring, mentoring, outreach and parent education,” she said.

Westminster High School, which has the highest dropout rate in the Huntington Beach Union High School District, has its own prevention program for potential dropouts.

The school selects 50 incoming freshmen who have been identified by their eighth-grade teachers as potential dropouts because of low reading skills, poor attendance and a pattern of underachievement. The students are placed in smaller classes where they receive more personalized attention. The program also gets parents involved by having them monitor homework for at least one hour on school nights and by having them in constant contact with teachers.

Anaheim Union High School District, which offers similar programs, has also hired its first full-time social worker and plans to hire two more to help students with problems at home get assistance from social services agencies outside of school. Three interns also assist the social worker and provide more one-to-one contact with the family, counselor and faculty.

While Orange County schools have made progress keeping kids in school, many believe there is still a long way to go.

“We are doing everything that we can to keep students in school,” said Bobbi Zane, Anaheim Union’s spokeswoman. “There is only so much that we can do. It’s up to the family to take advantage of a free public education. It’s just not a high school problem, it’s a social problem.”

In the Santa Ana Unified School District, officials are not only buoyed by a decrease in dropouts from 41.8% in 1986 to 22.8% in 1989, but also by a record enrollment of 3,815 ninth-grade students in 1990, about 600 more than the previous year.

District Supt. Rudy Castruita believes one of the programs most responsible for the decrease in dropouts and the increase in ninth-graders is Stay in School, which was initiated by Superior Court Judge Jack Mandel to show students that good things happen when they refuse to quit.

Mandel’s program brings professionals from all walks of life into 8th- and 10th-grade classrooms at least six times a semester, where they discuss the benefits of completing their education.

“There are lots of ways to overcome what these students may perceive as barriers to higher education or certain jobs,” said Greg Rankin, principal at Lathrop Intermediate School in Santa Ana. “This is one of many ways to raise students’ expectations of themselves. The students need to see that their potential can be unlimited.”

Following a similar theme as the Stay in School program, the district is also making an effort to reach students at an even younger age by hosting career days at all its elementary schools.