tiered intervention

We don’t often like to blow our own horn at NoDropouts, but we’re so proud of what we do and how we help kids that sometimes it’s difficult to resist.

NoDropouts, the dropout recovery program found at NoDropouts.com that sponsors this blog, recently was featured in a couple of different news stories.

Halloween may be over, but there are still scary things happening in Utah.

The University of Utah’s Utah Education Policy Center released a report on chronic absenteeism in the Beehive State, and they found that more than 13 percent of students are missing at least 10 percent of their classes.

"Chronic absenteeism is a red alert that students are headed for academic trouble and eventually for dropping out," said Hedy Chang, a webinar speaker and director of Attendance Works, a national initiative to promote awareness about the importance of school attendance, according to an article in The Salt Lake Tribune.

Yet another school board is working toward increasing the dropout age to 18.

In and near Surry County in North Carolina, a couple of different school boards are discussing measures to raise the dropout age. They say that most kids decide to drop out before the age of 16, and that with a 91 percent graduation rate in Mount Airy School, few kids do decide to drop out, according to the Mount Airy News.

Boston teens who are part of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender community are going to get some much-needed help in finding safe spaces at school.

The Hispanic Black Gay Coalition, with funding from the Hyams Foundation, will help establish gay-straight alliances in at least three Boston schools, according to a column in the Huffington Post by Pierre R. Berestain, spokesman for the coalition.

“At a time when reports indicate rising levels of bullying and harassment toward students, particularly LGBQ/T students of color, this initiative marks an important step toward creating schools that are more welcoming and inclusive,” Berestain wrote.

Trying to determine why students drop out of school can be challenging.

One researcher decided to take a different approach from much research and looked at dropouts and backtracked their educational histories.

Martha Abele Mac Iver looked at 1,646 students who dropped out of Baltimore City Schools in the 2008-2009 school year in her article, “Gradual Disengagement: A Portrait of the 2008-09 Dropouts in the Baltimore City Schools.” The statistics she found showed some pretty significant trends:

Students who move often can have difficulty feeling connected to school and can be at risk of dropping out of school.

More than 2 million children whose parents are in the military can move between six and nine times between preschool and graduation, and can go months without seeing a parent who is actively deployed, according to an article in the Deseret News.

Students drop out of high school for many reasons, and teachers and administrators always are looking for ways to find patterns to predict and prevent dropout.

Researchers Talisha Lee, Dewey Cornell, Anne Gregory and Xitao Fan explored suspensions and their effects in the paper “High Suspension Schools and Dropout Rates for Black and White Students.”

The authors looked at a statewide sample of 289 Virginia public high schools, looking at both black and white students’ suspension and dropout rates. They controlled for school demographics and school resources.

High school students face many challenges and obstacles that many of us as adults would struggle to handle.

Students who are refugees — who have fled war-torn countries, lost family members and uprooted their lives to reach safety — face particular struggles.

In much of the research on high school dropouts, students are often placed into a single category of dropout and not further analyzed.

Researchers Alex J. Bowers and Ryan Sprott, though, looked at the National Center for Education Statistics’ 2002 Education Longitudinal Study 2002 dataset and noncumulative grade point average. They analyzed GPA trajectories for the first three semesters of high school and created four subgroups of students in their paper “Examining the Multiple Trajectories Associated with Dropping Out of High School: A Growth Mixture Model Analysis.”

More foster children in Miami may be graduating soon.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded a $500,000 grant to Our Kids of Miami-Dade/Monroe Inc., which oversees the placement and care of abused and neglected children with foster families in the area, according to an Associated Press article in The Miami Herald.