Special Report: Ninth or Never | Tampabay.com • St. Petersburg Times

For 40,000 kids in Florida every year, ninth grade is where it all falls apart. No other grade offers such an honest view into what schools are really like, and by extension, so brutally forces us to confront the flip side: How we raise our kids. Yet recent education laws now demand that schools ensure that all students succeed, no matter how warped their brains, no matter how Jerry Springer their homes.

Chapter 1

Chaos
Ninth grade is where it all falls apart. In Florida, nearly 40,000 ninth-graders are held back each year, enough to fill every school in Sarasota County.
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Chapter 2

Highway to hell
Every year in Florida, more than 8,000 ninth-graders drop out of school, far more than any other grade.
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Chapter 3

Synchronicity
For millions of years, our ancestors spent a lot of time with their kids, if only to shield them from hungry predators. For the past few hundred, we haven't.
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Chapter 4

Erosion
The class of 2009 at Northeast could use the pick-me-up. In August, 813 ninth-graders enrolled, 680 are left.
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Epilogue
At the end of the 2005-06 school year, 639 freshmen were left at Northeast.
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