The Morgan Hill rival high schools, Live Oak and Ann Sobrato,
can’t really compete in the area of
”
best drop-out
”
rate – no one is a true winner unless the rate is zero. Sobrato,
however, is outdoing the Acorns with a steady 4.2 percent dropout
rate while Live Oak’s statistics show that almost one in every five
students are dropping out (19.8 percent).
The Morgan Hill rival high schools, Live Oak and Ann Sobrato, can’t really compete in the area of “best drop-out” rate – no one is a true winner unless the rate is zero. Sobrato, however, is outdoing the Acorns with a steady 4.2 percent dropout rate while Live Oak’s statistics show that almost one in every five students are dropping out (19.8 percent).
The high school dropout rate for the Morgan Hill Unified School District’s 2008-’09 school year increased by 75 percent or 6 percentage points, from 8 percent in ’07-’08 to 14 percent in ’08-’09. A total of 108 students dropped out of high school in ’08-’09 at MHUSD; 66 students from Live Oak, 16 from Sobrato and 26 students from Central Continuation High School.
The California Department of Education released its dropout and graduation rates Tuesday from ’08-’09, the latest data available. The way the it was collected, using the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System, has been criticized and may have some inaccuracies, according to Gilroy Unified School District Superintendent Deborah Flores. She said the new database is a “major shift” and she suspects that students with incomplete data were showing up as dropouts in the final report.
In the CDE’s press release, they too warned of possible missteps: “Caution should be used when analyzing this first year of data through CALPADS. There is always some variance in the information gathered in the first year of using a new data system. Some (local educational agencies) struggled with submitting this first year of data because no specific resources were made available to LEAs to implement the more complex CALPADS data submissions. Fluctuations in the individual rates of schools and districts submitting their data are to be expected, considering this is the first year of CALPADS implementation and reliance on aggregate formula rates.”
Nonetheless, the dropout paradigm is zigzagging at MHUSD, with Latino students representing the largest population of dropouts (70 students), white students rank second with 25 dropouts in ’08-’09.
Compared with Santa Clara County, MHUSD is faring better than its dropout rate of 16.1 percent and is keeping more students in classrooms than the state, which has a 21.7 percent dropout rate.
