Districts See Decline in Dropout Rate

A greater percentage of Ventura County high school students stayed in school during the academic year that ended last June than in the previous year, according to a new state Department of Education report.

“It’s nice to see it going down,” Chuck Weis, Ventura County superintendent of schools, said of the dropout rate. “But we know we lose kids, and that’s a travesty. We need to work on it.”

Most Ventura County school districts have seen a decline in dropouts over the last five years. The countywide dropout rate was 1.9% during the 1998-99 school year, 1.8% in 1999-2000 and 1.4% in 2000-01.

Statewide, 2.8% of high school students dropped out in 2000-01--the same rate as the two previous school years.

In 2000-01, the state graduation rate for seniors who had enrolled four years earlier was 68.9%, according to the report. But that doesn’t account for students who moved out of state, switched to private schools, took an extra year to graduate or entered adult schools or community colleges, said Donna Rothenbaum, an education program consultant for the state.

The data will not be precise until at least 2005, when an electronic system to track all California students is in place, Rothenbaum said.

Rates are not broken down by county, but the state calculated an estimate of the number of dropouts from 1997 to 2001, based on the 2000-01 rate. In Ventura County, an estimated 5.6%--or about 7,840 students--dropped out, down from an estimated 7.4% in 1998-99.

Last year, the most significant strides were made at Fillmore and Santa Paula high schools, which consistently score among the lowest on standardized tests.

In Santa Paula, the dropout rate decreased from 2.9% in 1999-2000 to 1.3% last school year. Educators attribute the change to a Gateway Community School program that began in the small farm town about 15 months ago.

The Gateway programs, which exist in several communities from Ventura to Moorpark, aim to recapture students who fall behind or are expelled from comprehensive and continuation high schools. Santa Paula’s campus is serving 98 students this year in classroom and independent study programs--teenagers who might otherwise be on the streets.

“Kids who have never been successful in school are seeing success here,” Santa Paula teacher Judy Dobbins said.

At Fillmore High School, administrators and teachers have implemented programs to prepare students for the new statewide exit exam and a new district rule that requires a 2.0 GPA for graduation.

Principal John Wilber said those efforts likely contributed to the school’s dropout rate decreasing from 4.4% to 1.4% over one school year.In the Conejo Valley and Oak Park school districts, the county’s highest performing high school systems, dropout rates .increased in 2000-01 over the previous school year.

But Mike Vollmert, testing coordinator for Conejo Valley Unified School District, said figures reported to the state from Thousand Oaks High School from 2001 were inaccurate because the staff person in charge left midyear.

Still, he said, any rise in the number of students dropping out is a concern, which is why Conejo offers many programs designed for at-risk teenagers.

“Educators need to do everything we possibly can to find a program that works for every single kid,” Vollmert said. “Anybody who says a comprehensive high school is perfect for every kid is naive or in serious denial.”

Some public education critics say the state’s four-year dropout estimates represent only a fraction of the true population of dropouts.

A recent report by San Francisco-based California Parents for Educational Choice, which lobbies for charter schools and school vouchers, says that more than one-third of California high school students leave school before graduation. The rate in Ventura County, according to the report, is 29.6%.

State and county officials disputed those numbers, saying the report assumes that students are dropping out when they may have moved out of the state’s public school system or into alternative programs.