LEWISTON, Maine — The list of students not in school gets forwarded to Lewiston High School Principal Gus LeBlanc every day. Some have missed a lot of days.
The 121 seniors who didn’t graduate with their class last year missed an average of 82 days. “That’s half the school year,” School Superintendent Bill Webster said.
In June 2011, 256 seniors completed their high school education in four years. That was 68 percent of the class.
The year before, 66 percent completed school in four years, giving Lewiston the fourth-lowest rate in Maine.
In 2008, 60 percent completed high school in four years.
“We’ve made great progress in the last five years,” Webster said. “We recognize the significant challenges that remain.”
Of the 32 percent who didn’t finish last year, some are attending high school for a fifth year. Some are continuing their education through Lewiston Adult Education. Others simply quit.
Last year, 91 high school students (6.6 percent of the total) dropped out.
When it comes to predicting who will not complete high school on time or drop out, two red flags are raised in a student’s early years: poor reading comprehension and poor attendance, LeBlanc said.
“If kids learn to not attend school when they’re in the elementary grade, that becomes a learned behavior ingrained in their lifestyle,” said LeBlanc, a former elementary school principal. “By the time they’re in high school, it’s difficult to change at that point.”
The profile of a student who didn’t complete high school and dropped out is a kid who doesn’t attend school — “a kid who’s had a history of a lack of academic success,” LeBlanc said. “Predominantly, they’re white. Predominantly, they’re male. Predominantly, they’re from low social-economic status.”
Poor attendance is a parental issue, he said.
“Parents have the greatest influence over whether kids attend or not,” LeBlanc said. “We really need to get parents on board to get their kids to attend school.”
Butch Pratt, Lewiston schools attendance manager, sees it firsthand, knocking on doors to find truant students.
“A lot of the truancy cases I follow, I’ve been chasing the same kids for five or six years,” he said. Their poor attendance began in the early grades.
Parents tell him they know their son or daughter should go to school, but they offer excuses, such as they needed a vacation or had to visit a grandparent.
“Often the parents, and their parents, didn’t complete high school,” Pratt said.
He and school administrators work with the families to try to convince them that attending is important.
“We’ve seen improvement with some,” Pratt said. “Some who missed 82 days, we get them to 40 days. That’s still a lot, but it’s better.”
Lewiston’s graduation and dropout rates are directly tied to poverty in Lewiston, to the culture in too many families that education is not a priority, to the fact that Lewiston is a service center, educators said.
Graduation rates in Falmouth and Cape Elizabeth are “wonderful,” LeBlanc said. “It’s not because the water’s better down there. Kids from affluent families get exposed to vocabulary, literature, to print. Kids of less affluent backgrounds — not because their parents don’t care — don’t have that enrichment.”
To help more students graduate, Lewiston has expanded programs. “But to tackle this problem around non-completers and dropouts, you can’t focus on the high school or middle school,” LeBlanc said. “It has to be systematic.”
That system is under construction, the superintendent said, with a growing number of early childhood programs for preschoolers and intervention programs for elementary and middle school students.
Among the new initiatives in the upcoming budget proposal are a preschool center at the Multi-Purpose Center; an expansion of Lewiston Academy, an in-house, after-school program; and creation of an alternative program that could hold up to 300.
Lewiston has also started a new pilot project that partners with a private school, Poland Spring Academy in Poland. That program could help some students who struggle in a big-school environment, Webster said.
Other steps include expanding summer school for seventh- and eighth- graders, “so we can identify kids at risk, work with them and get them caught up before they start the high school,” said Susan Martin, director of the English Language Learning Office.
Another change Lewiston has made is no longer suspending students who misbehave. They need discipline, but they need to be in school, Webster said.
At Montello Elementary, suspended students attend an in-house suspension program where they do school work.
“In the past, those students would have been home, or unsupervised, or with a parent who isn’t focused on education,” Webster said. “They’re now staying in school.”
He said he wants to expand the in-house suspension to other schools.
Students who didn’t complete high school in four years include homeless students, and students suffering from depression and other mental health issues.
Another group is immigrant students, mostly Somali, learning to speak English. English language learners make up 12 percent of the group that did not complete high school in four years, while 88 percent are native English speakers.
Lewiston High has 84 ELL students who have been in the country fewer than five years. “If English is not your first language, graduating in four years in most cases would mean giving you a diploma versus holding you to standards,” Martin said.
“And we have not lowered our standards,” Webster said. “If you are going to get a Lewiston High diploma, you have met the requirements.”
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I agree with you it starts at home. When I went to school some skipped school maybe twice the Senior Year but everyone graduated. Our parents may school a priority and everyone went to school. Parents that don’t see the need for education should be sent to jail for neglect. Because their children will be have trouble getting any type of job and this could lead them to commit crimes..
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The first thing I would require a high school freshman to do on the first day of class is read this short essay by John Gatto New York City Teacher of the year winner.
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.” I don’t know who decides that my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that’s not my business. My job is to make the kids like it — being locked in together, I mean — or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can’t imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.
This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too — the clothing business as well — unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!
Meanwhile, the school itself and teachers bend over backwards accommodating these dead beat kids, extending deadlines, offering tutoring, etc. and they still fail. Parents don’t accept responsibility and instead screech about “greedy union thugs” and lazy teachers. It’s ridiculous. Schools can only do so much, they’re just one part of the entire equation — everyone needs to step up.
Oh, and don’t forget “Deadbeat Parents”!
ABSOLUTELY! It makes my head spin with the hoops we have to jump through to get kids to do the things we all did only 20 years ago…boy have things changed! I say, “You can lead a horse to water…and even lower the head, put the water right there in front of you, offer you help in getting the water to you…BUT, I can not force you to drink that water.” and in a sense, that’s public schools.
I realize not all kids ‘come to the table’ with the same skills, home environment, and set of experiences, but at some point they’ve got to realize we are there to get them on the right course – if they’ll take the bait. Sadly, some don’t.
I don’t have personal knowledge of that town, only by the papers and its longstanding “reputation”, so I have to ask: “Is it just people reinforcing a stereotype?”
Why ar we wasting money on these losers? Our taxes for education here in Maine are way out of proportion for paying for kids that wont stay her anyway because of teh job market. Then you have these losers who will probably stay here and feed of of our welfare system. Pretty sad state of affairs.
When I was in High school, I hated getting out of bed to go. I faked illness more times than I could count, but yet I seemed to do much better after the bus had gone by.
When my absences started to become excessive, and after many doctor’s appointments (each time nothing was found wrong with me), My Mother told me that if I didn’t improve my attendance and flunked out, I would be required to get a job and start paying rent. She used the reasoning that since I always insisted that I was able to make my own decisions about my life, and I would no longer be in school if I flunked out, that she would start treating me as an adult, and adults paid bills.
My attendance at school improved significantly, and I graduated.
Smart mom! You’re lucky to have her.
The state of Maine needs to adopt some tried and true laws from other states that makes it unpleasant for kids to drop out of high school such as no drivers license until age 18, no eligibility for state programs unless in educational placement, and upping the legal age to withdraw from school
The fifth lesson is teaching kids how not to fall asleep during lessons one to through four.
Responsible parents make responsible kids. Not complicated.
“Kids of less affluent backgrounds — not because their parents don’t care — don’t have that enrichment.” … Really? If their parents “care”, they can help them learn to read with the cereal box on the kitchen table — if they bother to feed them anything more than Pop-Tarts and a can of soda for breakfast. It IS all about parenting!!
It all comes down to parents’ expectations. If they don’t expect their kids to spend time reading and being creative, that’s the kind of kids they’ll raise. If dinner discussions revolve around business deals, politics, law, and other enlightened topics, children will develop a broad knowledge beyond what’s taught in school.