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Callers urge dropouts: Drop back into school
By KELLY RYAN
© St. Petersburg Times, The piece of paper in guidance counselor Jean Lanier's hand didn't explain why the student from St. Petersburg High School dropped out. All Lanier knew was that he was 21 when he left school, had enough credits to be a senior and said he planned to go to night school. On a recent day, she dialed the student's home number for a better explanation. "I'm just wondering what he's doing," Lanier said to the student's sister, who was visiting from out of town and answered the phone. "Why did he leave school when he was a senior? Is he working? What kind of job?" Faced with a frustrating number of students who drop out of high school, the Pinellas School District has for more than a decade enlisted a half-dozen counselors to try to call every high school student who leaves before graduating. Working nights and weekends to make hundreds of calls apiece, this little-known group tries to steer the dropouts back to school. Because the district has no formal way of tracking what the dropouts do after the counselors reach them, no one knows how successful the "dropout recovery" program is. But W.J. Bryant, another counselor, has seen the success -- in students who get their GEDs, in students who register for classes at Pinellas Technical Education Center at his recommendation. He thinks as many as 65 percent of the students actually follow through with the plans they discuss. Statistics for the 1999-2000 school year revealed that only 64.3 percent of Pinellas students graduated within four years of entering ninth grade. Many of the rest return for another senior year, but others become candidates for the dropout recovery program. "I think it's well worth the effort we make to try to retrieve these kids," said Jim Montgomery, the school district's guidance supervisor. High school principals, guidance counselors and teachers have long lamented that they don't know what happens to the students who abandon their quest for a high school diploma. The dropout recovery counselors do -- at least for some of them. Each of the county's 16 high schools produces lists of students who officially file paperwork to leave high school early or who simply stop showing up. Every couple of weeks, those lists are divvied up among the dropout recovery counselors. In 2000-01, 1,269 students were on the lists. Of those, 291 didn't have phones, never answered, had disconnected phones, had the wrong number on their student information sheet or couldn't be reached for some other reason. The counselors are still trying to reach 449 of the dropouts. Marcia Goodwin, by day an eighth-grade guidance counselor at Pinellas Park Middle School, said she tries to give dropouts some options when she gets them on the phone. For some families, she even suggests counseling and other social services. Goodwin urges some of the younger students to return to regular high school. For some, she suggests vocational programs or night school. She wishes traditional high schools had more vocational offerings. She thinks some dropouts might stay in high school if they thought there was more to it than college-bound academics. "It's just sad that the value of education is not more important to some of the kids," Goodwin said. Most students, Bryant says, say poor attendance is the main reason for dropping out of school. Once behind, they feel that they will never graduate on time and think leaving is easier than staying in school and trying to catch up. Some say school is boring. Some have siblings who dropped out or parents who had bad experiences with school themselves. Bryant, who heads the 500 Role Models for Excellence mentor program for black male students, has also heard some tough stories. But some students say they needed to work to be able to support car payments. "I can understand if a child had to go out and get a job for the financial livelihood," Bryant said. "But for a car and forsaking education? Sometimes I feel like crying on the way home. There's just no sense." As for the 21-year-old student from St. Petersburg High, Lanier found out that he was working at a grocery store and had not followed through with plans to attend night school. Lanier, the seventh-grade guidance counselor at Seminole Middle School, said she would call again. "Some of them, their goals are for the weekend," Lanier said. "They have trouble thinking far ahead."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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