Students who failed get make-up classesAlison PflepsenFirst semester, Lorenzo Morales, a Wicker Park resident who is a freshman at Jones Academic Magnet High School in the South Loop, had to get up at 5 a.m. to get to his first-period class. He rarely managed to do that and, as a result, failed the class, World Studies. "I just had trouble getting to school," says the 15-year-old, who takes a train and a bus to school each day.
Second semester, Lorenzo got a chance to recover the lost credit through a $3 million School Board program that helps schools offer makeup courses before or after regular hours, including on Saturdays, and... > Read More |
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Parents take up role of fired truant officersDebra WilliamsOne sunny morning in May, Rosa Guerrero, the mother of a Farragut High School graduate, grabs a couple of folders at the school and heads out to knock on neighborhood doors. She's in search of truants. This day, she doesn't have to go far.
Just across 24th Street from the school, she knocks on the door of a senior who has missed a total of 25 days of school and is failing three classes. To her surprise, the young man answers the door.
"I'm not in school because I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon," he tells her. Asked about all the other days, he points to his leg... > Read More |
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Attendance policy keeps kids in schoolAlison PflepsenWhen John Jursa became principal of Prosser Career Academy four years ago, his first goal was to return order to a school that had just seen its principal, assistant principal and entire local school council dismissed in a grade-fixing scandal.
At the time, Prosser's attendance rate hovered around a mediocre 82 percent, some 180 students were tardy each day, and class cuts went virtually unchecked.
Jursa took on these numbers with a combination of tough new attendance policies and new programs to help students stay engaged in their studies.
Within a year, the... > Read More |
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Helping teenage moms stay in schoolBernice YeungThe first few months after her baby was born, 17-year-old Willie Mae Hayes frequently didn't get to school until second period because she had to wait for her mother to get home from the night shift to stay with baby.
Then a School Board program called Cradle to Classroom solved the problem for the Englewood High School junior. It helped her find a babysitter. Now, Willie Mae, who has dreams of becoming a lawyer or a math teacher, is rarely tardy.
Launched in 1997 at 20 high schools, Cradle to Classroom now provides 41 schools with a family advocate to help teen moms stay in... > Read More |
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Three pushouts who want to be in schoolMaureen Kelleher and Alison PflepsenAndre West
A budding talent
As a freshman, Andre West used to hop over the tall, wrought-iron fence that separates his home from Crane High School. But over the next 18 months, Andre himself proved to be the biggest obstacle to his getting an education. After three semesters and chronic absences, Andre was dropped from the school.
School records show Andre had no discipline problems, and teachers report he completed school work on the days he attended class. But he just wouldn't go.
Art teacher Lori Real remembers Andre as a budding talent. "His first... > Read More |
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15-year-olds dropped despite state lawMaureen KelleherUnder Illinois law, schools may not drop students for excessive absences if the students are under 16. However, some Chicago public schools do, a Catalystanalysis has found.
Catalyst examined student records (without names) from four classes of entering freshmen at seven schools—Collins, Farragut, Flower, Kelly, Phillips, Senn and Sullivan. Of the seven, only Kelly came up clean on underage drops. The other six schools dropped a total of at least 287 children under 16 between September 1994 and September 1998.
Farragut, the largest of the seven schools, had... > Read More |
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How schools hide dropouts on paperMaureen Kelleher"Everybody lies about their dropout rates," says Paul Vallas. Indeed, dropouts are a fertile field for white lies, damn lies and dubious statistics, to tweak a phrase.
First the statistics. Dropout rates typically get reported on an annual basis: the percentage of a school's students who exit formal schooling in any given year. For the Chicago Public Schools as a whole, that rate typically has landed in the mid to high teens, compared with a statewide rate around 6 percent.
However, an annual rate gives only a snapshot view of a problem that requires time-lapse photography... > Read More |
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Audit team scours six years of recordsMaureen KelleherSince March, a team from the Office of Schools and Regions has been auditing six years' worth of high school attendance records to ferret out the number of chronic truants who were allowed to remain on the rolls prior to the arrival of Mayor Daley's school team. The team has found some startling numbers. For example, at Wells High, the percentage of students absent more than 40 days dropped from 34.8 percent in 1994-95 to 13.3 percent last school year. The phenomenon is not uncommon. Over the same period, Wells' enrollment declined only slightly— from 1,692 to 1,557.
"The dropout... > Read More |
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Dropout rate to be counted for probationMaureen KelleherAt the urging of community leaders, Chief Executive Officer Paul Vallas and the School Board are taking steps to hold schools more accountable for their dropout rates and to increase programs to keep kids in school. In a March 19 letter to Vallas, Bill Leavy, executive director of the Greater West Town Development Project, urged Vallas "to acknowledge a growing dropout problem as an unintended, but related, consequence of" efforts to enforce high standards.
Stressing that his organization supports high standards, Leavy urged the board to consider dropout rates as well as test... > Read More |
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Dropout rate climbs as schools dump truantsMaureen KelleherUnder pressure to increase attendance rates and test scores, high schools are dropping more students from their rolls.
The number of dropouts from the Chicago Public Schools increased by almost 1,500 students between the last two school years even though high school enrollment dropped by almost 3,000, due to the School Reform Board's policy of retaining low-scoring students.
In 1996-97, 15,873 of the system's 101,590 high school students dropped out, for a rate of 15.6 percent, according to calculations by the Illinois State Board of Education.
The following year,... > Read More |
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