When Principal Brian Flanagan walks the white and green tiled halls of Somersworth High School, it seems he knows every student in the school. He’ll modestly tell you he doesn’t, though.

“Look out for John, he’s a whirling dervish,” Flanagan warns as a student rushes by.

He peeks into one of the school’s special education rooms, a typical looking classroom set up with tables and chairs so that students and teachers may work side by side. “You’re working with Vicky, aren’t you lucky,” he tells one of the special education teachers.

“Hi Shay, you’re not suntanning are you? Shay, go easy on that stuff,” Flanagan says to a tanned senior girl outside his office who returns his smile.

Flanagan has been the principal at Somersworth High School for six years now. He sees many of these students every weekday, joking with them in the halls, during lunchtime in the cafeteria, or after school as they go to sporting events or after school programs.

“The thing I like most (about being principal) is the way you can impact the lives of students,” says Flanagan. “I think we’re changing kids every day for the positive and that part is good.”

But Flanagan also sees many students leave Somersworth before their four years are up. For the 2003-2004 school year, the latest data available from the state, Somersworth recorded 49 students who dropped out of school. For a school of about 600 students, says Flanagan, that’s an annual dropout rate of 8 percent. The statewide annual dropout rate, which reflects how many students leave in a given year, is 3.8 percent. “I’m not pleased with the dropout rate,” Flanagan says. “We’ve got all our attention aimed at fixing the dropout problem now.”

Throughout the state, schools are showing dropout rates higher than the state’s 3.8 percent or the national annual average of 5.6 percent. Twenty-seven high schools in the state, out of 79 total, are above the statewide average for dropouts. Fourteen high schools in New Hampshire are equal to or above the national average. The state defines a dropout as either any student who completed the previous school year but did not return to school for the next fall semester, or any student who dropped out during the school year.

As administrators and teachers look within their schools and communities to determine the causes of the high rates, many of them are receiving help and advice from New Hampshire’s Department of Education. Eleven high schools statewide and their corresponding middle schools, ranging from Berlin to Nashua, are receiving assistance financed by a federal grant. The Achievement for Dropout Prevention and Excellence II (APEX II) grant is being funneled through the state Department of Education’s Bureau of Special Education. Three of the 11 schools receiving the assistance are located on the Seacoast: Somersworth High, Spaulding High in Rochester and Winnacunnet in Hampton.

national help
The state applied for the $2.1 million federal dropout prevention grant from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, a division of the U.S. Department of Education, with the design that it would be disbursed among 11 high schools in the state and their corresponding middle schools. APEX II is designed to cut the state’s dropout rate by 20 percent in the next three years. It was awarded to only two states, Minnesota and New Hampshire, out of 20 states nationwide that applied, says Dr. Robert Wells, project director and co-writer for the APEX II grant and a consultant for the Bureau of Special Education.

“The Department of Education wants to see a successful program which will reduce dropout rates,” says Wells. “New Hampshire is doing great with this model.”

APEX II expands the original APEX grant, which New Hampshire received four years ago as a model test project. The $250,000 APEX grant was applied to two schools, Franklin and Manchester Central. Manchester Central cut their annual dropout rate from 11 percent in 2001 to 9.2 percent in 2004. The staff and faculty at Franklin High School were able to reduce their dropout rate by 70 percent, going from a 16.9 percent annual dropout rate to 2.2 percent dropout rate over two years, says co-coordinator of the APEX II grant Gail Cormier. Cormier, along with director Wells and co-coordinator JoAnne Mallory, who is also the project director at the Institute on Disability at UNH, wrote the grant for APEX II. The APEX II grant also promised to expand APEX I, another reason that New Hampshire was chosen to receive the grant, Wells believes.

The 11 schools chosen to receive the APEX II grant all have dropout rates higher than the average annual state dropout rate. They were chosen based upon how severe their dropout rates were and their geographic distribution throughout the state. The state receives the grant money, and in turn hires help in the form of technical assistance and expertise to the schools.

“Eleven schools was our best judgment for how many we could support with the money that was available,” says Wells. “We tried to find a balance between being too ambitious and not being successful, and being too conservative and not helping enough schools.”

the causes
Gregory Tennant, 17, didn’t give a damn about teachers and never gave a second thought to skipping their classes.

Tennant is a freshman in his third year at Somersworth High School. Just a quarter credit shy of being considered a sophomore, Tennant estimates he has two and a half years before finishing school. He started failing last semester and left school for about three months.

“I started failing bad,” says Tennant, “and I realized all my friends were moving up in grades. I didn’t want to be left behind.”

So he left school, and was reported as a dropout.

Now using the programs offered to him at Somersworth, Tennant is working to finish up his last couple years as quickly as possible. And with guidance counseling, he has changed many of his old habits.

“It’s helped me find what I wanted to do and change my ways of slacking off and just being a failure,” says Tennant.

A vocational school class called Industrial, Commercial, Agriculture and Mechanical (ICAM) that deals with welding, metal fabrication, and repair of outdoor power equipment, has helped him develop a possible career choice.

Some of the teachers have also played a role in helping him succeed, says Tennant. Trish Nadeau, a teacher in the Somersworth Alternative School, a part of the high school, is one example. “She works with you step by step,” he says. “She talks it out and explains the problem to the best of her abilities and how to do the work.”

Tennant has seen several examples of students who have slacked off and turned to teachers like Nadeau for help.

Former Superintendent of Somersworth Dr. Chuck Ott, a school psychologist who has been involved in public education for 35 years, has been formally studying dropout causes and prevention at the Strafford Learning Center in Somersworth. He’s working on a program called North Star, which implements dropout prevention and recovery programs in the six member school districts of the Strafford Learning Center.

The North Star program works with students in each of these districts who have either dropped out or are at-risk of dropping out, focusing on three components: community initiatives, face-to-face education planning with the at-risk student and his or her family, and inter-district compacts so that students may try programs aimed at dropout prevention in other districts that might better suit their needs.
Ott says there are many causes for dropping out, internal and external to the school.

“Many factors coalesce that result in students feeling that school is just not for them,” says Ott.
Some of the external factors include a lack of family support and the influence of drugs and alcohol. While drugs and alcohol may not cause the dropout problem, they will often exacerbate it, says Ott.
Within the schools, students may feel a lack of real-world relevance. A typical school environment isn’t easily applied to a meaningful kind of work, says Ott.

“Some kids may find it very difficult spending an entire day going from classroom to classroom,” says Ott. “High schools must reform and make the entire community a classroom.” Visiting job sites or involving students in community service may help, but students need to experience something with value and meaning in order to be motivated to learn, says Ott.

“It’s when these two factors—internal and external—are both going in the wrong direction they really amplify one another,” says Ott, “and result in a high likelihood of a student dropping out of school.”

The prospects are bleak both for a state with a high dropout rate and for students who don’t graduate with a diploma. Statewide economic implications include an uneducated workforce, but the consequences for the students are much greater, in Ott’s opinion, including living an unsatisfying lifestyle. “Non-high-school degree students are often stuck in low-wage, dead-end occupations or are simply unemployed,” says Ott.

Principal Flanagan agrees with Ott’s perspective that alcohol and drugs play a large role in dropouts. But he sees a change in priorities, like having a job and earning spending money for cars and other items, as an influence as well. When this occurs, education is no longer the highest priority in a student’s life, says Flanagan. 

steps to recovery
The focus of the APEX II grant is on two models: Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support  and Project RENEW (Rehabilitation for Empowerment, Natural Supports, Education and Work). PBIS and Project RENEW are being implemented at each of the 11 schools. PBIS is a school-wide climate change model for school administrators, staff and faculty. The goal is to teach and support positive student behaviors in school environments, both classroom and non-classroom (i.e. hallways, cafeteria).

The Project RENEW model works individually with at-risk students who have already dropped out or are about to drop out, says Wells. The program uses counselors from the Alliance for Community Supports, a statewide nonprofit organization that focuses on implementing Project RENEW, among other mentoring programs. ACS counselors meet directly with students, assessing what has to be accomplished so that at-risk students may return to or continue to stay in high school. According to Gail Cormier, executive director of ACS, counselors, or case managers, will train teachers to act as counselors for their own students.

“Counselors might work with 10 or 12 kids individually,” says Wells. “They get the students involved in their own future.”

Project RENEW mentoring is established as early as ninth grade to support the at-risk student’s needs, and to incorporate their strengths into an academic plan.

Another important aspect of the APEX II grant is the inclusion of middle school students, particularly eighth graders, in the programs and objectives. Individualized performance plans for at-risk eighth graders are designed with input from students, parents, teachers or significant role models in the students’ lives. Eighth grade students are also given tests to measure their literacy skills in order to place them in the correct high school classes and programs, says Cormier. The APEX II grant will expand the drop-out prevention programs already implemented at the high schools or work to add necessary programs into the schools.

“Our plan is to enhance the programs already set-up for dropout prevention,” says Wells.

At Somersworth, Karen Soule, superintendent of SAU #56, is working to fix the problem she says resulted in a 71 percent graduation rate last spring. Part of the solution is asking students what they want to do after they graduate and what needs to be done to achieve this.

Somersworth’s Bridges to Success program, created in 2002, is a school-wide initiative to address at-risk students. It’s divided into three parts: a credit recovery program for those who need extra credits to graduate or pass to high school, a 90-minute a day mentoring program for at-risk freshman, and an expanded summer school program that includes tutoring.

“We’re looking at which students enroll and how we can help them settle in,” says Soule.

A new attendance policy boosted the school’s average daily attendance rate from an all-time low of 88 percent to 95.8 percent in two years. A new student-mentor program has also been initiated by the newly created dropout prevention committee, says Soule. A mentoring program at the Middle School already pairs University of New Hampshire students with middle school students. The new high school student-mentoring program uses faculty, administrative staff, SAU staff, and a school board member to work with students identified by teachers as needing extra support. The mentors meet with students outside the classroom, with parents’ permission, and help students with school work, acting as a link between the student’s teachers and the student’s parents, keeping parents updated on the child’s progress in the classroom.

“We’re trying to open as many avenues to give students as many opportunities as we can,” says Soule, who, along with Flanagan, is one of the 52 adult mentors in the program.

Flanagan checks weekly with his two students’ teachers, obtaining progress reports then calling the parents with the good (or bad) information. The mentor-student relationship extends outside the classroom also, and mentors, with parents’ permission, may take their students to activities like lunch, movies or athletic events.

The goal of the mentors is to build positive adult relationships as opposed to teacher-student relationships.

“This program goes beyond their contracts, beyond the classroom, beyond everyone’s call of duty,” says Steve MacKenzie, head of the Somersworth English Department and the dropout prevention committee.
Robert Pinkham, 17, is a junior at Somersworth High School and a student in the new mentoring program. Pinkham left school for about half of last semester, withdrawing in February, and was reported as a dropout.

“I was heavy into drugs and thought I knew it all,” Pinkham says of the reasons he left school. “I was getting in trouble all the time and skipping classes to leave and do drugs.”

Pinkham, who says he would really just come to school to sell drugs, meet up with friends, and do drugs, says many faculty and staff members didn’t feel safe with him in the building, and many expressed this verbally to him. Even Pinkham admits that his behavior was unsafe at times.
For Pinkham, the programs at Somersworth High School haven’t played as much a role in his return to school as his own personal motivation has.

“I realized all of the sudden I’m not going to be a kid forever,” says Pinkham. “It was time to grow up. Time to make a change in my life.”

Taking advantage of the opportunities depends on the individual, says Pinkham. Most students look at school as waking up early and having to be responsible for most of their day, which discourages them. On the other hand, parents who are strong believers in getting through high school and receiving a diploma really press this on their children, he says, which adds to a student’s self-motivation. Drugs can also play a role, having a big impact on all aspects of your life, he says, including academics.

“I’m doing this for me,” says Pinkham, fully intent on graduating in a year and a half. “A diploma is a necessity. A GED just won’t cut it.”  

Staff and faculty at Spaulding High School in Rochester, another recipient of the APEX II grant, are dealing with high dropout rates as well. For the 2003-2004 school year, the school had an annual dropout rate of 6.4 percent (105 students were recorded as dropouts last year), and a cumulative rate of 23.2 percent (how many students will drop out of a given class between freshman year and graduation). Three years ago (2000-2001) Spaulding’s annual dropout rate was 7.8 percent annual, or a cumulative 28 percent. The new programs have helped them lower that rate.

The school is planning even more programs, though. Last year, they introduced an online program, designed by an educational software company and tailored to state requirements, to help students make up failed credits. A more focused Freshman Academy is one program the school will implement next year, says 12th grade assistant principal Susan Randall. The new Freshman Academy will have smaller classes, primarily located within the same section of the school, and the freshman teachers will have more contact with one another to discuss specific students.

“Freshmen are at a high risk because they are in a transition,” says Randall. “Once they start failing, a culmination of things start to kick in.”

The Bud Carlson Alternative School at Spaulding High School offers smaller classes and more self-paced learning for students who have a problem in a traditional classroom setting, says Randall. Students are typically referred by guidance counselors, administrative staff or teachers based on their frequent truancy, disciplinary problems, problems keeping up with school work, and academic failures. Two teachers and an aid at the alternative school help students meet the school graduation requirements by developing goals and objectives in a four-year academic plan for every student.

“I think no one program will work great in isolation,” says Randall. “It’s when you have a lot working together (that you’re successful).”

Last summer, members of the guidance department called students who had dropped out the previous year to invite them back to Spaulding. The phone call, which the Spaulding guidance counselors have been doing for two years now, always elicits some returns. Linda Durant, chair of the guidance department, personally made 10 phone calls; three of the students she was able to contact returned to school in the fall. One has since withdrawn.

“If your just convincing one student,” says Durant, “that’s one more student that makes it.”
During the phone calls, guidance counselors will also suggest alternatives to students more leery of returning, like a night school to makeup credits.

In addition to several other guidance department programs, Spaulding High also has a full-time social worker who works with students and the families of those who need help staying in school.

Winnacunnet High School principal Randy Zito says that his school has only agreed to the first year of the APEX II grant so far, and is planning to look at the grant’s proposals before agreeing to additional years. Currently, the school sends letters to the parents of students in danger of dropping out, Zito says, but the school has tutoring only for special education students or handicapped students. Zito hopes that next year they’ll have funds for formal tutoring for at-risk students. School administrators are also recommending a regional alternative school, says Zito. The Winnacunnet students would be able to use the alternative school, located on the Exeter High School campus, for classes. Zito also wants to institutionalize a year-round remediation program.

An important aspect of planning more dropout prevention programs, says Zito, is making sure the data is accurately represented and reported. Currently the school is looking to the state for a unified method of managing the data, he says. 

“We’re trying to get procedures down so data is an accurate representation of what it actually is,” says Zito.  “We’re also looking at our own policies to make sure we have the right policies to keep kids in school.”

slipping through the cracks
Autumn Harriaman, 18, a junior, has been a student at Somersworth High School for three years. She left the school when she moved with her mother to Maine last February. Instead of returning to high school in Maine, she decided to get her general educational development (GED) degree on her own, studying for it from a study guide. She is still waiting on the results from the test, but in the meantime has returned to Somersworth. One issue she thinks is a problem for dropouts is that teachers and counselors don’t emphasize that there are other options through which they can pursue a degree.
“I don’t think they make it clear that there are other options,” says Harriaman. “They (teachers and counselors) want them to stay and get their high school degree. But kids have to stay throughout high school.”

While at Somersworth, Harriaman receives help during a daily study block, which counts as academic credit. Study blocks, or organized study periods that replaced study hall nine years ago, are two classrooms “set aside for students who benefit from smaller group settings,” says Flanagan. Each class has two special education teachers and three aids to help students with school work and class scheduling. Harriaman also has a study block teacher who helps her with class scheduling and what credits she needs to graduate.

“I don’t think I’d be able to do it by myself,” she says. “I’d feel overwhelmed.”

If Harriaman decides to stay at Somersworth, she will graduate in 2007. If her GED score is high enough, though, she plans to apply to Hesser College and leave Somersworth High School if accepted. This poses another problem for Flanagan, who must report Harriaman as a dropout for a second time if she decides to leave for college.

“We found five students last year listed as dropouts,” says Flanagan. “They were home-schooled children.” Home-schoolers’ curricula must be approved by the school district. The home-school teachers didn’t obtain this approval, so the district assumed the children were not returning to school or had dropped out permanently.

Scenarios like Autumn’s and the home-schooled students’ are fairly common, but often the situation is reversed; schools will misreport students to reduce their dropout rates. The No Child Left Behind Act holds school districts accountable for how many students drop out, and more dropouts means less funding from the government. But only in the past three or four years has New Hampshire made its reporting system more uniform and reliable, says Dr. Chuck Ott.

“The state up to this point has not had an adequate reporting process,” he says. “In the past the definitions weren’t as clear for the actions on how to count kids that drop out.”

Even last year’s estimated cumulative dropout rate (an estimate of the percentage of current students who will dropout in a given class before graduation) of 14.5 percent isn’t correct, according to Douglas Hall, executive director of the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies. Hall believes the amount of cumulative dropouts in the state is closer to 24 percent, and Ott agrees that this number isn’t far off.
Hall, the author of “One in Four: High School Dropouts in New Hampshire” (2002) and “Still ‘One in Four’: High School Dropouts in New Hampshire” (2004) believes that the dropout data reporting prior to five years ago in New Hampshire was flawed. “The dropouts were only counted in the middle of the school year,” says Hall. “The numbers that were submitted to the feds were woefully low” because schools didn’t count the large percentage to students who dropped out during the summer. Since then the schools have begun to report those numbers, but Hall says that still isn’t reporting the true amount of dropouts. Many students who leave school are often counted in the wrong category.

 For example, schools will list a student as a transfer without waiting for confirmation from the new district, and the transfer students in some cases will not enroll in the new school.

This problem will be solved with a new uniform student database, which Hall recommended in his 2004 report. The database will assign each student an identification number, so the real names of each student will not be recorded. The database, known as I4SEE (Initiative 4 Student Empowerment and Excellence), would be used to verify enrollment, transferring, graduation and dropout status for each student who enters the public school system in New Hampshire, helping to closely track transfer students. Already the state has begun a pilot program of I4SEE, says Hall.

Hall also recommends that the school districts report all students who transfer in and out of their districts. He is working with the Department of Education to get a pilot program for this reporting in 10 school districts.

Similarly, expelled students aren’t always listed as dropouts, regardless of whether or not the student moves to another school district to enroll. Hall says these students should be listed officially as dropouts, unless confirmation is received that they re-enrolled at another school.

Alternative school and home-school students are also a factor in the reported dropout rate.
Alternative school students, who are often the most at risk of dropping out says Hall, often disappear in the program after being reported as a transfer to an alternative school. Many of these students drop out during the four years.

Students who don’t complete home-school programs are also not reported in each district as a dropout. This occurs because teachers and parents of home-schooled students aren’t required by law to report their students’ progress after age 16, says Hall. He recommends that the Legislature require parents and teachers to report whether or not these students completed a minimum high school degree or stopped their home-schooling before finishing the degree.  

Hall’s hope, if the schools and state continue to implement his recommendations, is that the estimated cumulative dropout rate will drop from 24 to 20 percent. And with help from APEX II, perhaps 11 more success stories, like that at Franklin High School, can be reported.

School officials and administrative staff at Franklin High School implemented a variety of new programs that resemble those at Somersworth and Spaulding high schools. Franklin High School officials formed a task force to look at the reasons students were dropping out and what caused these reasons. The school’s attendance policy was also changed. The previous policy gave little opportunity for students to makeup missed work. Now they can makeup work after school with a teacher or makeup classes and credits independently using a computer program called Novanet.

Both the PBIS and Project RENEW models were implemented at Franklin High School with the original APEX grant. Using the PBIS model, students were rewarded with tickets for doing positive things. They could use these tickets, for example, to go to a high school dance for free. With the help of Project RENEW mentors from ACS, students tried different methods of learning, like independent studying and tutoring. A freshman student mentoring program was also implemented at the high school.

Back in the hallways of Somersworth High School, Principal Flanagan says the school is looking toward the future for results and new ideas. APEX II will help add any programs that Somersworth may not have, but they’re looking forward to new programs to implement in the school, reviewing many of the suggestions they’ve already received from administration and faculty to deal with dropout prevention. Somersworth is also waiting to see results from the mentoring program. With positive results, Flanagan guarantees that more teachers and administrators will want to be mentors as well. And they’re waiting for the next marking period with “bated breath” to see more results from the new attendance policy. “I can’t wait to see kids who will probably be on the honor roll for coming to school each day,” says Flanagan. And they’re looking forward to next year, when they’ll record their rates again, to see if they’ve dropped below the state average.

“By the end of the year we’ll be off the list for sure,” reassures Flanagan.