Lenoir County Public Schools has cut its dropout rate to a five-year low at a time when its four-year graduation rate is at an all-time high of 84.6 percent. Earlier this year engineering students at South Lenoir High School got a hands-on introduction to the manufacturing process and modern aerostructure production in a first-of-its-kind partnership between LCPS and Spirit Aerosystems. Submitted photo.

Lenoir County Public Schools cut its dropout rate to the lowest level in at least five years during the 2018-2019 school year, using “every strategy possible to retain and encourage students to remain in school.”

The rate declined to 2.38 last school year from 2.96 the previous year. The dropout rate for the 2014-2015 school year was 4.71.

The actual number of students who left school ahead of graduation or were unaccounted for according to state guidelines declined to 61 last school year from 80 the previous year. Two of LCPS’s traditional high schools – Kinston and North Lenoir – and Lenoir County Learning Academy, the district’s alternative school, cut their dropout numbers significantly.

The lower dropout rate comes at a time when LCPS’s four-year graduation rate is at an all-time high of 84.6 percent.

Success lay in keeping students at the center of the school experience and employing more tools to help them overcome barriers to graduation, according to Assistant Superintendent Nicholas Harvey II, who reported on the dropout rate at the Dec. 2 meeting of the Lenoir County Board of Education.

“The power of relationships that are established between our students and staff is the No. 1 deterrent against a possible dropout,” Harvey said.

“I would like to say thanks for the hard work of our student services team and principals for embracing the challenge of being creative and using every strategy possible to retain and encourage students to remain in school.”

Those strategies include online instruction to help high school students make up course credits required for graduation and a required meeting of parent and student with the district’s Alternative Placement Council, which Harvey leads. Conferences with a school’s guidance department and with the principal are also required.

Curriculum options, including access to college-level classes “for students looking for a non-traditional, expedited high school experience,” and a focus on required courses that tend to be stumbling blocks for students have also helped cut the dropout rate, according to Harvey. “Our high school principals have realized that Math I seems to be the gateway to high school completion,” he said. “Therefore, our principals extended the Math I course to a year-long option.”

North Lenoir High School recorded the steepest decline in dropouts by taking what principal Gil Respess calls an “all-hands-on-deck approach” involving everyone from counselors to office staff and by offering some curriculum options “to ensure the success of our students,” Respess said.

“We are now teaching Math I all year as opposed to semester long. This has decreased the number of students who fail the course,” he said. “We also ran a summer school last summer where more than 30 students earned back a credit from a course they had previously failed. Every member of our staff has adopted a personal goal of building relationships with their students and their families.”

From the 2017-2018 school year to 2018-2019, North Lenoir saw the number of dropouts go from 29 to 16 and the dropout rate decline from 3.12 to 2.38. For 2018-2019, the rate at Kinston High was 2.56, down from 2.99; at Lenoir County Learning Academy, 15.94, down from 29.79; at South Lenoir, 2.23, up from 1.91.

Poor attendance prompted the majority of the 2018-2019 dropouts in LCPS, a trend across the state. “That’s why we feel it was important another step was put in place (with the Alternative Placement Council) to have those students come to our office to encourage them and to explain to them that we do have options. We can be very creative with scheduling,” Harvey said.

Students are also counted as dropouts if they leave public school to enroll in a GED program, if they choose work over school or if they are incarcerated, among other reasons. Of the 61 former students counted in 2018-2019, 37 were male and 24 were female.

The state average dropout rate for 2017-2018, the latest year available, was 2.18.

The dropout rate is calculated by multiplying the number of dropouts for the school year by 100, then dividing by the 20th day membership for that year plus the number of dropouts for that year.