High school dropout rate falls to 6 percent

Terry Webster

Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2000 | 11:03 a.m.

A new report is expected to show the Clark County School District's high school dropout rate fell from about 9 percent during the 1998-99 school year to 6 percent during the 1999-2000 school year, Superintendent Carlos Garcia said.

The district's full internal report, based on the 1999-2000 school year, is expected to be released in January, school district spokeswoman Mary Stanley-Larsen said.

Garcia credits the decline in the dropout rate to new reporting methods and programs aimed at keeping students in school.

"We're on a positive roll, and how we're going to keep doing that is to do a better job of keeping and collecting data," Garcia said.

The district last year began more closely tracking students who failed to return to school. By state law, students who transfer out of Clark County schools without requesting transcripts or otherwise informing administrators that they are enrolling in another school are counted as dropouts.

Improvements in tracking students were credited for the majority of the decline in 1998-1999, when the rate dropped to 9 percent from 11.8 percent the previous school year.

The school district maintains that Clark County's high transiency rate has inflated the dropout rate, and it instituted the tracking system to combat that trend.

Garcia said he expects the rate to continue falling as the district institutes more programs aimed at dropouts.

One program planned for next year will offer students ways to catch up on course credits without taking summer school or night courses. A few schools will experiment with a new scheduling system that will allow students to take eight courses instead of the usual six.

Students need 22.5 high school credits and a passing grade on the state High School Proficiency Exam to get a diploma. Those who finish the credits but do not pass the exam receive a certificate of completion.

Twenty-eight percent of all Clark County high school students this year are behind by two or more credits on their path to graduation, the district reported last month.

The district's efforts won't end with the new scheduling option, Garcia said.

"I think that in the future, we're going to visit twilight programs," Garcia said. "These are evening programs that will be offered at local high schools, instead of sending students to Horizon schools that are located throughout the city. I think we can think smarter and offer some of the evening programs at regular high schools. This way, kids don't have to travel as far."

The district's Horizon and Sunset school programs, part of the alternative education division, are designed to help students who have fallen behind in required course credits and are in danger of not graduating.

"We're going to take a comprehensive approach to this," Garcia said. "By addressing the credit deficiency issue, we're hitting one portion of it."

The improvements may not show immediately in independent studies that have ranked Nevada as having one of the worst dropout rates in the nation.

Most prominently, the Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2000 Kids Count survey, released in June, ranked Nevada 50th, with a dropout rate of 17 percent.

The rate was based on a three-year average of U.S. Census estimates of dropouts ages 16 to 19 from 1996 to 1998. The 2001 survey will reflect data from 1997 to 1999.