One in five drop out at Live Oak

The Morgan Hill rival high schools, Live Oak and Ann Sobrato,
can’t really compete in the area of
”
best drop-out
”
rate
– neither can be a true winner unless the rate is zero.
The Morgan Hill rival high schools, Live Oak and Ann Sobrato, can’t really compete in the area of “best drop-out” rate – neither can be a true winner unless the rate is zero.

The Bulldogs, however, trounced the Acorns with a steady 4.2 percent dropout rate while Live Oak’s statistics show that nearly one in five students (19.8 percent) are quitting high school before graduation.

The high school dropout rate for the Morgan Hill Unified School District’s 2008-’09 school year increased by 75 percent, 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 (population 1,279), 16 from Sobrato (1,565) and 26 students from Central Continuation High School (161). MHUSD serves 9,620 students at its 15 school campuses, including an Adult Education program housed at Britton Middle School.

The California Department of Education released its annual report on 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 include 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.

MHUSD Superintendent Wes Smith was unavailable for comment.

According to the California Department of Education, high school dropout rates will tend to be lower than the state rate and graduation rates will be higher because many students at risk of dropping out are placed in county-run dropout recovery or educational option programs. So if students drop out, this would be attributed to the county-run or educational option program, rather than to the traditional high school.

Sobrato also trumped Live Oak with its graduation rate of 96.6 percent compared with 81.8 percent. Since 2006, Live Oak has waned in graduating its seniors: from 86 percent in ’06-’07 to 85.3 percent in ’07-’08 and falling last year by about 4.5 percent. Sobrato has increased since 2006 from 95.5 percent to 95.9 percent and the latest figure of 96.6 percent of its seniors earn a high school diploma.

“It is shocking, bottom line, but until I hear from the district office – what might have been going on then – I don’t want to overreact,” said MHUSD Trustee Shelle Thomas.

The school board will reconvene Dec. 14, where they likely will discuss the results of the CDE’s latest report.

No other school in Santa Clara County has similar demographics as MHUSD with almost a 50/50 ratio of Latino students and white students. Most other districts in the county have a more clear majority, or a distinct split among Asian students and white students.

At Gilroy Unified, about 60 percent of students are Hispanic, while about 40 percent are white or non-Hispanic to comprise its 11,116 students. GUSD’s dropout rate was 22.2 percent in ’08-’09, slightly higher than MHUSD’s. The percentage of high school students graduating was identical at the South County school districts: 86.3 percent.

Recently elected Trustee Ron Woolf, a retired Morgan Hill Teacher of the Year, said Thursday that he would prefer to do more research before commenting on the startling stats at Live Oak.

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), while white students rank second with 25 dropouts; eight students, four Asian students and one Filipino student.

The estimated dropout rate statewide among Latinos is at 26.9 percent and among African-Americans it is 36.9 percent. The percentages for both subgroups are up by approximately 3 percentage points, mirroring the percentage increase in the statewide results. 

Compared with Santa Clara County, MHUSD is faring better than its dropout rate of 16.1 percent.

In California, 70.1 percent of public school students graduated from high school, up from 68.5 percent last year. The adjusted four-year dropout rate for the same school year is 21.7 percent, up from 18.9 percent last year.

“I am glad to see the graduation rate inch up, but remain deeply concerned that the dropout rate is also increasing slightly,” Jack O’Connell said, the state superintendent of public instruction. “We now have a data system that allows us to track students more accurately and have honest conversations about how to improve graduation rates and reduce dropouts among all subgroups of students. Next year we will transition totally to the use of student-level longitudinal data and will be able to calculate the most accurate graduation and dropout rates possible.”