Oregon Live: Beginning with the class of 2014, Oregon will count hundreds of students who completed four years of high school but don’t have diplomas as “graduates,” thereby raising the state’s on-time high school graduation rate, which currently ranks second-lowest in the nation.
The change is designed to more accurately reflect that those students successfully completed four years of high school and lack diplomas only because of an anomaly in Oregon’s school funding rules:
Districts can continue to receive state funding of nearly $7,000 a year for students younger than 21 who haven’t earned diplomas — and numerous districts use that loophole to allow students who have met all the requirements for a high school diploma to remain on the books for a fifth year of high school while the high school helps them attend a first year of community college. Only when they complete that college year does the high school give them their high school diploma.
It sounds strange, but more than a half-dozen high schools outside the Portland metro area do it, including those in Dalles, Albany, Redmond and Lebanon.
State officials haven’t had an official count of how many schools and students are participating. But now they will get one.
Educators who operate the fifth-year programs say the are a win-win: Students get extra support from a high school teacher or counselor who helps shepherd them through registration and other hurdles at community college and monitors their progress in every community college course. And the high schools get somewhat more money from the state than they pay to the community college, allowing them to pay for the advising and even pocket some of the difference.
But the big drawback, for the districts and for the state, has been the impact on the graduation rate: Since those students didn’t get their high school diploma until they completed the year at community college, they were counted as failing to graduate on time.
That made the graduation rate at schools like Lebanon High and Dallas High look alarming low — 41 percent and 52 percent, respectively, for the class of 2013 — and lowered the statewide graduation rate by at least a full percentage point.
So the state is changing the rules. Any student who has met all the requirements for a diploma but not been awarded one will be counted in a new category of graduates, “4F.”
School board members in some districts that don’t offer students the free first year of community college option say it’s unfair for other districts to use state money designed to fund elementary, middle and high school to pay for community college instead. The Oregon School Boards Association is considering whether to lobby for a change in the policy in the coming legislative session.
School board members who favor the change say they understand the programs are worthwhile but say they should be paid for from a different source, rather than diluting the pot of money set aside to pay for K-12 education.
New school-by-school graduation rates reflecting the new rules for tallying graduates will be released in January. Those rates also will reflect another change announced last month, counting students who earn “modified” special education diplomas as graduates, too.
DCG