NORTHUMBERLAND — Keeping students from dropping out of school is a constant struggle, a Milton educator says, but his district’s creative approach is paying dividends.
Superintendent William Clark said Milton Area Senior High School in 2005 re-introduced evening classes targeted at those students on the brink of dropping out.
Since then, the high school has cut its annual dropout numbers from 32 to 16.
But it takes work, Clark said Wednesday during a conference sponsored by the Central Pennsylvania Workforce Development Corp. on youths in transition and what schools and communities can do to help them.
“Not only do you have to educate the child,” Clark said, “but you have to educate the parents in the value of the education. Sometimes, unfortunately, the parents don’t value education. Either they dropped out and they think their kid will survive, but they still want a better life for their kid than they have.
“If you emphasize and drive that home, it seems that the parents feel a little more respect for the school and a little more favoritism to encourage their child to continue their education.”
Youths in transition, according to Rachel Smith, of the Central Pennsylvania Workforce Development Corp., refers to those who have dropped out of high school and those who are aging out of foster care.
State education records show Pennsylvania high schools had a 12 percent dropout rate in 2005. Those who chose to quit their education cite a number of reasons, said Melissa Orner, of the Philadelphia Youth Network, including the need to support a family, a life-changing event, boredom and poor performance in class.
“They end up losing motivation to stay in school because they end up having to repeat the ninth grade again and again, and they don’t see the end in sight,” Orner said.
She suggested schools get creative in trying to re-engage these students, potentially by holding evening classes to allow them to catch up.
Schools and communities also are beginning to reach out more to teenagers about to leave foster care.
Of the state’s 20,000 children in foster care, 5,000 of them are 16 to 18 and 1,000 age out every year, according to Steve Eidson, of the University of Pittsburgh’s Child Welfare Training Program.
Though some form of foster care has been around for centuries, it’s only been in the past 15 to 20 years that the state has begun to pay more attention to its responsibilities in preparing these children for life outside the system, Eidson said.
“Many times people see foster youth, I think, as being bad and so they’re not worth wasting time,” he said. “And instead, what we have to help people understand often is that foster youth had some bad happen to them — they were abused or neglected or abandoned — and we need to help people see that they are worth working with, that they’re an investment that we really should make.”
The federal government provides funding to counties which, in many instances, are the only true guardians of these children.
“We’re looking at life-skills training,” Eidson said. “We’re looking at employment, housing preparation, career. We’d like them to have connections and mentors and also to focus on wellness and so, again, many of the same things that a parent would do, the state or the county needs to step in.”
To learn more about the issues facing these teenagers, the Central Pennsylvania Workforce Development Corp. will use a grant from the state Department of Labor and Industry to conduct a research project and share the results with potential stakeholders in the organization’s nine-county coverage area, which includes Montour, Northumberland, Snyder and Union.
Those stakeholders include school districts, juvenile justice organizations, institutions of post-secondary education, child-welfare agencies and community-based youth organizations.
According to Smith, keeping youths in school just makes good economic sense.
“We recognize both the social implications of serving these targeted youth ... we know that this is the right thing to do because these youth need to be connected to resources for education and employment,” she said. “But we also recognize that this is an economic issue that we need all individuals, who are willing and able to work, to have the skill sets to be able to contribute to our regional economy.”
n E-mail comments to akeister@dailyitem.com.
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