Trading in on a diploma
Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Jerry Weast said in a memo released Monday that falling graduation rates and rising dropout numbers were “discouraging” and defied easy solutions. Weast wrote that the graduation rates of black and Hispanic students, which have decreased at faster rates than their white and Asian peers, were especially disheartening.
Despite “myriad strategies” to keep students in school, “we continue to lose students, and there appear to be as many unique sets of factors and facts as there are students who drop out,” Weast said.
The graduation rate fell to about 87 percent in 2009, down from a recent peak of nearly 93 percent in 2003. As a result, the school system has fallen to 11th best at graduation among the state’s 24 school systems, down from second place in the early part of the decade.
The percentage of students who dropped out of school increased to nearly 3 percent in 2009, up from less than 2 percent as recently as 2005. As a result, Montgomery’s ranking among Maryland’s districts fell to 14th place, from first place in 2002.
Diego Uriburu, deputy executive director of advocacy group Identity, works closely with Montgomery schools on behalf of the county’s growing population of Hispanic residents. In 2009, about 5 percent of Hispanic students dropped out, more than any other racial group in the county.
Uriburu said that only about 50 percent of Hispanic students feel as though they’re succeeding in the schools. For the rest, he’s working with the county’s new Latino Youth Collaborative to offer solutions.
“For some of the youth whose path did not involve college — especially those who had had interrupted education in the past, they would’ve benefited from more vocational offerings,” Uriburu said.
