Raising dropout age next year fuels concerns

When the Jefferson County Board of Education passed a rule last year raising the dropout age from 16 to 18, school officials and community members alike applauded the move.

However, JCPS administrators are predicting a surge of about 2,800 more students who will be labeled as habitually truant next school year thanks to the change. And the district is expecting to have to find and bring back about 350 students who've dropped out but will suddenly be under-age next school year — although those numbers are just projections, officials stressed.

"This has never been done before," said Sam Rich, director of pupil personnel for Jefferson County Public Schools. "The bar just raised."

Officials across Jefferson County are working to gauge the short-term impacts and to beef up responses in dealing with at-risk students.

"I have rough ideas of how to deal with this but I won't know until I get in and see it," said Rich, who added that his department has historically been geared toward dealing with students up to the age of 16. He said he supports the higher compulsory

attendance age but added that it will create logistical issues in the beginning.

"It's like a home being rehabbed. There will be surprise costs."

Linda Duncan, a JCPS board member, said she thinks the implementation could be "messy" for the school district. She said district staff that deal with attendance issues may be busier than ever, and she worried that staff may need to be shifted or added to cater to at-risk students.

JCPS officials had for years joined with state education leaders and Gov. Steve Beshear in favor of raising the compulsory school attendance from 16 to 18, saying it would encourage students to graduate and would underscore the importance of education.

Statewide, the law goes into effect in 2017-2018, although it starts earlier in some districts like JCPS, which switches to the new law next school year.

JCPS's Rich said the district is trying to track down students who have dropped out. He said some have moved out of the county, while others have "disappeared to parts unknown. ... For the ones that are still there, we will do home visits. We will contact them."

Rich said the district is having school counselors inform students that the new law is coming. JCPS is also planning to reach out to community groups and to put up posters and reach out on social media to inform students of the change. "I hope there will be a percentage that won't drop out to start with (this year)," Rich said.

Just raising the drop-out age is not going to do much by itself to put a significant dent in the dropout rate or raise the graduation rate, experts have said. Instead, the laws need to be coupled with extra support and alternatives for struggling students.

Indeed, a higher compulsory school attendance law would not have kept Schylar Breitenstein in school, said the 16-year-old who quit going to school after her freshman year.

Schylar said she didn't make the transition to high school well. She never felt like she fit in, and she struggled with depression and anxiety. When she spent some time out of class to get help for her struggle with self-harm, no one at the school helped her get caught up on schoolwork, she said. "I had a lot of disconnect," she said.

Schylar dropped out, saying she'd do homeschooling, but "I was not really doing anything. I wasn't planning on doing anything, either."

Schylar's dad, who works for the school district, managed to convince Schylar to go into an alternative program. She is doing well now at Liberty High, and is on track to graduate. But she said that if her parents had not known about Liberty and had not pushed her to visit the school, she may very well be a dropout now.

"I would have flown under the radar," Schylar said. She said she wished that JCPS officials had told her about other options she had besides dropping out. "I wouldn't have felt so cornered, I guess," she said.

JCPS spokeswoman Mandy Simpson said the district has a number of alternatives and options for students. She said some JCPS students don't know about different magnets, career programs or alternative schools that the district offers, and said JCPS is beefing up efforts with community groups to increase student awareness.

Simpson said the newly created "transition centers" that started at middle and high schools this year will help students who have dropped out and are coming back, as well as students who are often absent from school. The transition centers are meant to help students who were in an alternative school or on extended absence to ease back into everyday school life.

Simpson ticked off other existing district initiatives that the district will lean on this coming school year, including the Family Resource Youth Service Centers and the flexible school schedule offered at Jefferson County High School. In addition, JCPS is piloting "at-risk committees" at three high schools; the committees use data to try to find at-risk students and intervene early.

Buell Snyder, a part-time administrator at JCPS working on dropout prevention, said different students will need different solutions to engage them in school, and that what may help one 16-year-old student struggling with attendance issues may be different from another student who has already dropped out. He said the district is also going to better publicize its early graduation options so students know they can graduate with a diploma before 18.

The biggest challenge to the district is the unknown, of trying to prepare without knowing how many students will come back to school or what their individual needs may be, Snyder said.

Meanwhile, the court system is busy preparing for potentially more habitually truant students — a process made more uncertain in light of another new law that is expected to steer students who skip school and commit other "status offenses" into diversion programs rather than into jail.

This law, SB 200, expands the role of court-designated workers and creates 15-member Family Accountability, Intervention and Response teams in hopes of helping kids with underlying problems that may be contributing to truancy or other behaviors. The idea of the law is to divert status offenders from jail and into other programs.

Work is still underway to get the changes off the ground before the implementation of this bill this summer.

"This is like building a plane and making it fly at the same time," Rich said of the creation of the family accountability teams.

District Court Judge Dee McDonald, who presides over the juvenile delinquency docket, said all the changes are "kind of overwhelming right now when you look at it, but ... we have a lot of people on board who really care about the kids and are committed to making this work."

McDonald said the big question is how to keep students in school in the first place and not thinking about skipping school or dropping out. "I hope there are things to engage these older kids and keep them there," she said.

Reporter Allison Ross can be reached at (502) 582-4241. Follow her on Twitter at @allisonSross.

Quick facts about dropouts

— In JCPS, 18 is already the peak age for students to drop out. In the 2012-2013 school year, 1,222 students dropped out. Of those, 356 were 18, while 131 were 16 and 212 were 17, according to district data.

— The decision to drop out starts young, experts say, with students often missing school in earlier grades before later dropping out. Last school year, JCPS had 6,882 students, 2,753 of which were in high school, who missed 25 or more days of classes.

— Dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, have lower earning power and to cost more to taxpayers through unrealized tax revenue and other costs, according to the National Dropout Prevention Center.