Article

Hundreds succeed, but scores drop out

Thursday, June 29, 2006 • BY JOHN MOONEY • Star-Ledger Staff

Nearly 400 graduates of Paterson's John F. Kennedy High School marched into their commencement last week in single file, many of them poor, most from immigrant families, all of them celebrating.

"I'm going to Disney World," exclaimed Luis Sosa, an 18-year-old graduate at the end of the line.

Amid the celebration, however, there was a remarkable void. At least half of the original freshman class, perhaps as many as 400 students, had simply disappeared from the high school scene. While there is little tracking of where they may have gone, many surely dropped out of school entirely, leaving one Kennedy administrator to shrug in resignation as he looked upon the Class of 2006.

"Those kids out there are the ones who did what they had to do, who hung in there and passed everything they were supposed to," said Frank Bonadies, the school's physical education supervisor. "Now we just have to find the formula for the other third."

New Jersey boasts the highest graduation rate in the country, at better than 84 percent, according to a new report that put the national average at 69 percent.

But at urban schools like Kennedy the picture is far different, reflecting a crisis that persists in many cities across the state and country, where far fewer students graduate and educators continue to struggle to figure out what will work.

Kennedy has one of the lowest graduation rates in the state, with the Class of 2005 representing just 59 percent of the freshman class four years earlier. The rate for the Class of 2006 will probably be even lower -- 382 students walked last Thursday -- and another 33 are expected to earn their diplomas over the summer. The freshman class, four years ago, topped 800.

Only Camden High School, at 38 percent last year, had fewer freshmen go on to graduate.

The low numbers are the underside of New Jersey's otherwise stellar record for graduating students, according to a national report released last week by the trade journal Education Week.

That 84 percent overall figure was despite just 69 percent of New Jersey's Hispanic students and 66 percent of black students graduating within four years. Among black males, the rate dropped further to 57 percent, compared with 69 percent for black females.

These realities all play out at Kennedy, a three-story brick building where half of the 2,800 students are Hispanic, a third are black, and fewer than a 10th are white.

Nearly half of the students last year were poor enough to qualify for free or subsidized lunches. And where boys outnumbered girls in their freshman year, the senior class was almost 60 percent female.

"We as educators need to change to meet these kids' needs," said Kennedy's Principal, Kathi Kellett.

Kennedy is home to several efforts the state is pushing on its urban high schools through its powers under the Abbott v. Burke school equity rulings. Much of the focus is on breaking up the large high schools, in which teachers can see 200 students a day and students are herded from class to class.

"Kids moving from middle schools into these larger high schools; it's killing them," Kellett said. "The large comprehensive high school has become a dinosaur."

So, starting next year, most freshmen will be with the same teachers for two years in self-contained "houses." The school already has in place five smaller academies with different subject emphasis, including business, health care and science.

"There is a place for them to go (within the larger school), a sense of community, a sense of family," said Mary DeMoor, an English teacher in the communications academy. "As teachers, there is more a feeling that kids belong to us."

The connections with teachers made a difference for Sosa, the student at the end of the graduation procession. He singled out history teacher Edgardo Nieves.

"He speaks in a language we can understand, keeping it real," Sosa said. "And when I screwed up a few times, oh, he let me know."

These ideas of smaller programs are hardly new to high schools, including Kennedy. And even as promising as they appear, the academies still only serve about a third of the students, those who have applied for entry.

"We really haven't had the staying power," said Stan Karp, a former Kennedy teacher who works for a Newark advocacy group pushing the reforms. "There has yet to be a commitment to provide this to all students."

But the smaller settings appeared to work for David Thomas' son, Re'Jean, who attended the business academy and earned a diploma June 22. But as he left the graduation, the elder Thomas said education has to extend beyond the classroom.

"You got to have both parents at home and keep it positive when there is so much negativity around," the 42-year-old Thomas said. "You hang with the wrong crowd, we tell Re'Jean, and those kids with nothing could be you."

Still, many officials add that any improvements to the high schools and their dropout numbers will require broader changes within an entire school system.

For example, a new requirement for Abbott high schools starting in fall 2008 will demand all students complete Algebra I by the end of their freshman year. But to bring algebra to all freshman will require pre-algebra in middle schools.

"You can't let those (middle school) grades be a wasteland and then expect somehow magically all kinds of good things happen in ninth grade," said state acting Education Commissioner Lucille Davy. "It doesn't work that way."

It wasn't so much the lack of these programs that drove Quinton Curry to the edge of dropping out.

"Part of it was I was lazy, and part of it was because of the cut policy," he said this week.

Curry's cut classes in his sophomore year amounted to more than the maximum 20 allowed absent days.

That brought intervention by a teacher and another chance. But Curry still came close again this year, missing 18 days.

"When you see your friends chillin' and having fun, and you have to go to school, I guess that was peer pressure," he said.

But Curry said his family pushed him, as did even some of those same friends. "They knew it wasn't an option for them anymore," he said.

And now Curry is a summer course away from passing the required high school graduation test, on which he fell just three points short in math. After that, Curry said he will go Passaic County College and hopefully pursue a career in business, maybe selling real estate. But first things first.

"I'll definitely get my diploma," he said. "For me, it's a must."

For many, graduation day is no celebration

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