Dropout OpEd

His name isn’t Johnny, but let’s pretend it is. He doesn’t like school – hates it in fact – and would rather be tinkering with his car or just sleeping in.

But he’s 15 and still in school – barely. Later this month, or maybe next, he’ll start missing a day or two. By April, he probably won’t be going at all. Johnny will have dropped out. He will have joined the other 1 in 4 young people in Washington State that never graduate from high school.

Johnny will have an excuse for leaving school – most likely something like “it doesn’t teach me anything relevant, anything which will help me get a job once I leave.” And his parents may even buy into his decision. But, I don’t. His parents shouldn’t. And we as a community, a society, or a nation can’t afford to!

The consequences of leaving high school without a diploma are tremendous. According to the National Association of School Psychologists, each year’s class of dropout will cost the country over $200 billion during their lifetimes in lost earnings and unrealized tax revenue. Furthermore, dropouts comprise nearly half of the heads of households on welfare and even a slightly higher percentage of the prison population. Then consider this: the average annual cost of maintaining a prisoner is at least three times higher than the annual dollars expended to educate a school-age child.

Now, let’s bring that research home. In 2002 in Washington State, the median annual earnings for a person with a high school diploma was $30,000; for a person without, $17,000. The median hourly wages for a high school graduate was $14.93 compared to $9.24 for a dropout. Moreover, a high school dropout’s likelihood of living in poverty is nearly three times higher than if they had finished high school!

Clearly, we in Washington – and in the United States – have a problem. Two years ago, the Workforce Board, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the state’s Employment Security Department took a step towards solving it by using federal funds to set up 12 dropout prevention and retrieval programs around the state, including one in Tacoma-Pierce County.

So this is what happened to Johnny if he was a student in the Bethel and Puyallup school districts. Instead of letting him simply start missing school days, someone noticed. Someone talked to Johnny - tried to understand his school issues and worked with him to resolve them. Johnny worked with a mentor that helped him develop an individualized success plan which would lay out the steps Johnny needed to take to make him believe he had a future. That there was a job he could do even if he didn’t like the way things were taught at school. That mentor encouraged Johnny, was there with him when issues arose with his teachers, parents or school administrators. And pointed Johnny to a variety of community programs which might provide financial aid or assistance with some of his challenges.

Last year, there were 333 students like Johnny in the Bethel and Puyallup school districts alone—all of them ‘at risk’ of never graduating from high school. That multi-district dropout prevention program prevented 60 percent of ‘at risk’ students from dropping out. Not everyone. But they tried!

When we face nationwide statistics which show that one high school student drops out every nine seconds in the United States, ‘trying’ to give young people a future is the very least we can do!