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.