Cape Girardeau School District, community groups take on 90 percent graduation goal

On an Indian summer afternoon on the south side of Cape Girardeau, the sun was warm, the leaves were ablaze in color and Malcolm Harris was going nowhere fast.

The 19-year-old dropout smoked a cigarette as he sauntered along the sidewalk, heading back to his Bloomfield Street home. Harris, who said he dropped out of the Cape Girardeau Alternative Education Center, insists he'd love to go back -- but he can't. He has to work a full-time job, he said, to take care of his 5-month-old daughter.

"If I could go back to school and get my education I would," Harris said, "but my daughter needs Pampers and wipes."

His is another story of disconnect in a school district with a 73 percent graduation rate. That's higher than the national average, which fell to 68.8 percent in 2007, according to the latest data from "Diplomas Count 2010," but lower than the statewide average of 84.3 percent. And the district's percentage of graduates is far lower than the Cape Girardeau School District wants it to be. Raising graduation and attendance rates is a big part of the district's Comprehensive School Improvement Plan, and those initiatives affect every aspect of academic performance.

But drive down many of the city's streets on a school day, say Harris, community leader Pat King and others, and you're likely to see plenty of young people who should be in school.

"Oh my gosh, when it's warm you won't be able to get down through the streets, there'll be so many children," said King, director of Cape Area Family Resource Center on South Sprigg Street. "All you have to do is ride and look."

There are myriad reasons why some of Cape Girardeau's children are choosing to stay away from school, experts say: economic circumstances, lack of parental involvement, behavioral problems, discouragement and plain unwillingness. Whatever the causes, the Cape Girardeau School District and a communitywide campaign known as the Education Solutions Team are trying to raise the graduation rate, cut down on truancy and bolster attendance. Members admit they have their work cut out for them but say failure is not an option.

Dropout nation?

"I believe in Cape Girardeau, Mo., our families want to do what is best for their child," said Nancy Jernigan, executive director of United Way of Southeast Missouri. "There's a role for everybody."

Sponsored by the United Way, the Education Solutions Team and its stakeholders -- including public schools in Cape Girardeau and Jackson as well as a number of business partners, organizations and the faith community -- are putting together a report spelling out the problems and offering solutions to build the graduation rate. The team's goal is to boost graduation rates to 90 percent by 2019.

Cape Girardeau Central High School has a more ambitious goal, 90 percent by 2014. Principal Mike Cowan said the quest won't be easy but that the target is based on successful models in school districts with similar demographics. Many of those schools, Cowan said, have employed a variety of interventions that not only have boosted the graduation rate but have raised student enrollment in post-secondary education to 90 percent or better.

The national picture is bleak, according to a number of studies on the nation's education system. "Left Behind in America: The Nation's Dropout Crisis," a report issued last year by the Center for Labor Market Studies, found that in 2007 16 percent of people ages 16 to 24 were dropouts. Nearly one in five U.S. men fit the category, with blacks accounting for nearly 19 percent, and Hispanics more than 30 percent. Whites made up about 12 percent of the dropouts.

"America is currently in the throes of a persistent high school dropout crisis that has been a long time in the making," the report says.

But is the problem that bad?

The U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences pegged the status dropout rate at 8 percent in 2008, down from 14 percent in 1980. Among racial categories over the same period, the dropout rate declined from 19.1 percent to 9.9 percent, and down from 35 percent to 18.3 percent for Hispanics. For whites, the dropout rate sank from 11.4 percent to 4.8 percent, according to the institute. There's a disconnect somewhere, and some say more often than not dropouts are undercounted or incorrectly figured in graduation rates.

Graduation rates in the Cape Girardeau School District have fallen in the past five years from 80.9 percent in 2006, according to state statistics. Rates for black students have fluctuated over the period, from 59.3 percent in 2006 to 71.3 percent the next year to 64.3 percent in 2010.

Analyzing the disconnect

Pat King didn't get where she is today by being demure. A high school dropout herself, the single mother got her GED diploma when her high school daughter declared she was dropping out of school.

"She came to me and said to me that I didn't feel the need to graduate," King said. "I got up and enrolled in a GED class. It took me six months. I told her 'I got mine, now you get yours.'"

Today, King is a college graduate serving, among others, students at risk of educational failure. She said she talks to a lot of south-side families at the resource center who feel disconnected from the school system and that many low-income residents, especially blacks, feel intimidated by school administrators.

"A majority of the time when they're called to school it's not because the child did something good," King said. "When they hear from school it's basically because their children are misbehaving."

Educators say the district tries hard, through many means, to keep parents connected and to include positive contact in calls and letters home.

King said the disconnect goes beyond precarious relationships. She said the district often would rather not deal with problem students, that it's easier to suspend students than amend student behavior. The school's tougher attendance policy, holding parents accountable for chronically absent students, appears to be having the intended effect of bringing truants back to class. But King said their return will come with consequences for schools.

"These children, laid out of school all this time, they don't want to listen to their parents, but now they've got to go back to school. And now they're angry," King said. "They're coming. What you going to do to handle that?"

That's not to suggest that the district should give up on the students, King said, but she asserts the schools need better plans to handle problem students before absentee, truancy and other behavioral issues get out of hand. In Missouri, the compulsory attendance age is 17.

Jo Peukert, coordinator for the United Way's Life Initiative, which includes the Cape Family Resource Center under its operational umbrella, said schools are working hard to reach dropouts but that sometimes the severity of discipline policies hinder the cause. The retired longtime educator would like to see a "compassionate" re-entry plan for errant students.

"Because if a child walks in there and feels like he doesn't have a chance of succeeding, is he going to return? No. Is he going to try to get suspended and booted out? Yes," she said.

"If we really want to save that soul here in school, we're going to look at it a different way."

Taking charge

The school district is finding success in a number of programs aimed at keeping teens in school and moving toward graduation. It begins early, educators say, by engaging students in education and through the overall commitment of the professional learning community initiative, doing whatever it takes to help students succeed. The efforts are paying dividends at the primary education level, said Mark Cook, principal of Jefferson Elementary School.

"I have seen vast improvements as far as students engaged in the classroom," Cook said. And if they're engaged, they'll want to come back, he said.

The buy-in is critical, said Debra Rau, guidance counselor at Franklin Elementary School.

"One of the things I have noticed here is that we have really talked about the importance of why they need to be here every day," Rau said. "Unless you explain that to a 7- or 8-year-old, they don't understand; they have to buy into this whole educational process."

It continues with career exploration in the middle school and junior high levels, and experiential learning and skill development at the Cape Girardeau Career and Technology Center, where students who don't always connect in the classroom may be more engaged in technical and industrial pursuits.

While Cowan agrees that the current graduation rate is a districtwide problem, he said the high school must stand up to the challenge. An intensive education program called Preparing for Academic Success is making strides in cutting freshman failure rates. The intervention method targets struggling students through academic support within the school day. In the program's two years, second-semester incidence rates of failure have fallen from nearly 19 percent to 12.3 percent. The program also tracks freshman who have fallen off the graduation track. Second-semester incidence rates of students off graduation pace fell from 20.8 percent in 2007-08 to 14.1 percent last year.

"Research shows if they don't move with their freshman class to sophomores, they get discouraged," Cowan said. "Our goal is to get as many of them to that sophomore status as we can and not have as many of them fall behind."

When students drop out, the district does everything possible to bring them back, said Carla Fee, principal of the Cape Girardeau Alternative Education Center and At-Risk coordinator for the district. She said it can be a frustrating, if not futile, pursuit. As to assertions by King and others that district discipline policies can be too harsh and that schools don't want the headaches of disruptive students, Fee said the rules and guidelines are in place for a reason.

"The basic fact is that when children come to school they have to follow the rules," she said. "If they don't, that is going to lead to them being suspended from school, and I know that's a vicious cycle."

While he has yet to follow his advice, Malcolm Harris said he encourages truants and dropouts on the city's south side to get off the streets and back to school.

"This ain't nothing, man, walking around here all day," Harris said. "You can get addicted to being out here and not going to school. It's nothing good for you, but that's just how it is."

mkittle@semissourian.com

388-3627

Pertinent address:

1000 S. Silver Springs Road, Cape Girardeau, MO

301 N. Clark Ave., Cape Girardeau, MO

1202 S. Sprigg St., Cape Girardeau, MO

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