By Melissa Dunson

mdunson@joplinglobe.com

About half of Joplin High School’s dropouts cite economic reasons for leaving school when surveyed, district officials said.

Students feel the pressure and expectation of getting jobs and making money, officials said, sometimes because of their choices and sometimes because of their families.

“We don’t want a kid having to work to ever be the reason they drop out of school,” said Jason Cravens, assistant principal.

The Joplin School District just finished a yearlong strategic planning process. Fifteen of the nearly 40 strategies outlined in a newly minted strategic plan focus on increasing the number of students who graduate. Last school year, the rate was 73.5 percent.

Superintendent C.J. Huff said the district will first focus on the strategies that address the economic component of the dropout rate.

At the top of that list are alternative high-school and middle-school programs. Huff said it is one of the more controversial parts of the plan, but doesn’t have to resemble Joplin’s alternative programs of the past.

Some of the possible locations for alternative programs include Memorial Middle School, the Missouri Career Center in Joplin or at different local businesses.

The final structure of the alternative program could depend on whether or not Gov. Jay Nixon signs a Senate bill that would create flexible programs where high-school juniors and seniors enroll in a few traditional classes each semester, but spend most of their time working at a job and testing on core competencies.

Huff said the flex programs allow students to work and make money while earning school credit.

“The alternative site could be in a school, or a separate site, or their workplace or the local library — wherever students feel comfortable,” Huff said. “That’s outside the box, but it’s still school. We send a qualified person to work with the kids and the kids do the work and meet the expectations.”

“We bring the school to (the students) and package it creatively, while keeping expectations and quality high,” he said.

Huff said the district is working on alternative programming and watching closely what happens with the senate bill.

The action plan calls for the alternative high-school and the alternative middle-school programs to each have four core teachers at $45,000 each, one counselor at $50,000 each and one social worker at $30,000 each.

Officials said success in the alternative program alone could boost the graduation rate by 10 percent.

Another major strategy to improve the graduation rate is to start an intensive mentoring or casework program called Check and Connect. The program would assign full-time caseworkers to 40 to 50 at-risk students at a time. The caseworker works with the students on a weekly basis, connecting them with people, services and programs and monitoring the students’ progress as they move from grade to grade.

The district proposes to start the program with four monitors to oversee 200 students. The cost is estimated at $102,500 for the first year, but Huff thinks the district can find some alternative funding to pay for the positions. The district has also considered using volunteers rather than full-time staff members as case workers.

‘At-risk’

All of the 15 strategies targeting the graduation rate focus on “at-risk” students.

Criteria for determining whether the student is “at-risk” include whether the student has lower than 90 percent attendance, has an “F” in math or English or two “F”s in one semester, or lives in a single-parent household.

Huff said the district already tracks that information through its Infinite Campus computer system and will create a program to electronically “flag” students who meet that criteria. Staff will then match up those students with the intervention strategies listed in the plan. The district will be able to electronically track those students’ progress through school.

Behavior expectations

School officials also plan to expand a program that establishes clearly defined behavioral expectations for students to create a more consistent school environment. Joplin implemented the Positive Behavior Support (PBS) program at Emerson Elementary last year with the philosophy that uniform behavioral standards would translate into fewer student trips to the principal’s office and free up more time for teachers and administrators who normally deal with behavior issues.

Emerson’s PBS program was one of 133 recognized as “outstanding” by the state last year.

Joplin will expand the PBS program to the rest of the district as part of the strategic plan. The program is estimated to reduce the number of office referrals by 25 percent.

The program would cost about $36,500 for the substitute teachers who cover for Joplin teachers while they undergo PBS training. Supplies for the training are estimated to cost about $500.

Learning centers, School Within a School

Currently, Joplin tutoring usually happens one student at a time with an individual teacher before or after class. The strategic plan calls for each school to create a space within each building where students of all grades can meet with a variety of teachers throughout the school day.

“The most effective tutoring that’s going to happen is going to happen during the school day when kids are still engaged,” Huff said. “Research shows you lose significantly when you do that before or after the school day.”

Students will be able to voluntarily choose to attend the learning centers, but at-risk students will be strongly encouraged to participate.

District teachers would serve as rotating daily monitors for the learning centers. Community members and older students in the A+ Program and the National Honor Society can help with tutoring.

Community help

Huff said the district can’t do this alone and part of the strategic plan is to enlist help from 50 area businesses, 50 faith-based organizations and 20 human service organizations. These groups will commit their time, talent and resources to help the district with many of the district’s intervention plans.

Hiring staff to solicit the community for help and then organize the people and money once they are committed is estimated to cost $30,000 to $72,500. In the end, the goal is that the strategy will actually bring $1 million in new money into the schools, bringing an estimated return of $13.79 for every $1 the district invests into it.

Huff said the community partnerships could be in place this year.

Cravens said another part of the plan is to focus more attention on the pivotal 9th grade year, when middle-school students make the transition into high school. It’s traditionally the time when students disengage from school.

Joplin plans to create a School Within a School program that groups at-risk students together and leads them through the same core classes with the same teachers in the ninth-grade year. The arrangement would help provide the students a support base and develop an identity in high school.

“It creates better communication between teachers because they all have the same students,” Cravens said.

Cravens said the SWS model could be implemented at the high school in the next couple years. If successful, it will be expanded into the sophomore year.

Extracurriculars

Joplin High School Football Coach Doug Buckmaster said he’s seen the positive benefits extracurricular activities, particularly sports, have on his students.

“These kids are doing better in school, they’re making better grades, they’re learning to manage their time, they learn discipline, accountability and social skills — they are going to be more successful,” Buckmaster said.

Joplin’s strategic planning group agreed and included a plan to create more before- and after-school clubs and activities. The goal is also to increase the percentage of students involved in extracurriculars. The new clubs and activities will be tailored to the specific groups of at-risk student at each school building. Students will take an interest inventory at the start and end of each school year and activities will be created to match those interests.

The Joplin plan calls for as many as 60 new clubs and the estimated cost for that is $30,000 a year.

While many of the plans have already been started, Cravens warned that Joplin’s cultural ideas about education won’t change overnight.

“I know that the problem was not created in a day and it won’t be fixed in a day,” he said. “We want so badly to change things quickly, but we are dealing with a cultural problem.”

By the numbers

Joplin Schools finished the regular 2008-2009 school year with a graduation rate of 73.5 percent, but Joplin High School Principal Kerry Sachetta expects the final number for the year to be closer to 75 percent when the new school year starts. Last year, Joplin’s graduation rate was 73.3 percent. Missouri’s average graduation rate was 85.2 percent in 2008.