THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 7, 1995 TAG: 9503070005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Norfolk public schools have the highest dropout rate in Virginia. Calculated basically for grades 7 through 12, as the state requires, the dropout rate for the school year 1993-94 was 8 percent, or more than twice the statewide rate of 3.5 percent. That's bad enough. Look more closely and it gets worse.
Ninety-four percent of Norfolk students who dropped out of school last year dropped out of the 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th grades. Calculated as the number of high-school dropouts, Norfolk's dropout rate last year was almost 13 percent.
The reasons for that high rate are many. One that has drawn particular attention is the crackdown last year on enforcement of attendance and behavior rules. The rules are tough. But class attendance is essential to learning both subject matter and personal responsibility. So is removing from a classroom students whose behavior disrupts others' learning and the teachers' teaching.
Superintendent Roy Nichols is right: The stricter attendance policy that Norfolk schools adopted last year, and the tougher discipline policy, which resulted in 15 percent more expulsions or long-term suspensions, must remain in place.
Behavior is not the main reason Norfolk students drop out. According to the Norfolk Public Schools Report of Dropouts, 1993-94 School Year, 17 percent of ninth- through 12-graders left school because of behavior. The rest dropped out for ``achievement'' reasons. But poor behavior in school and poor achievement in school are closely linked.
So are poor achievement in school and poverty. In Norfolk, which has the largest public-assistance caseload in the state, poor achievement in schoolchildren is closely linked to single-parent families, many of them in public housing and on public assistance. These problems and others that schools alone cannot remedy contributed to 1,000 dropouts from Norfolk high schools last year - 1,000 teenagers who face a very bleak future.
The tougher discipline policy seems to have shaped some students up: Fewer students have been expelled this year than this time last year. Still, Norfolk schools must - and are - finding more places and ways to educate students expelled or suspended for behavior. Leaving them on the street, and leaving their schooling to the streets, is no favor to them or society at large. In its session last month, the General Assembly provided another boost to school attendance by linking it to Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Whether these measures also boost Norfolk schools' performance depends. It depends on the schools' ability - and the community's - to interest, challenge, discipline, nurture, even feed its large population of high-schoolers so at risk of dropping out.
It depends as well on maintaining policies that provide the at-risk student extra help without distracting teachers - and the school system - from their primary responsibility: the students who, as Superintendent Nichols has put it, ``are serious about getting an education.'' by CNB