I just stumbled upon my high school’s state website, and here are the stats for 2005-2006:
| Enrollment | 523 |
| Graduates | 56 |
| Graduation rate | 82.4% |
| Free lunch | 24% |
| Reduced lunch | 12% |
| Attendance rate | 95.7% |
| ISTEP pass all grades | 69.6% |
| Graduates pursuing college education | 77% |
I have no idea what the difference between "free" and "reduced" lunch is, so don’t ask me. The attendance rate is high, but it’s a rural school. What else is there to do if you’re not in school? And life is still pretty traditional there. Parents expect their kids to be in school, and if they aren’t, there’s hell to pay. There are a couple of things I find interesting.
First, in 2005-2006, there were only 56 in the graduating class. According to the alumni page on the state school site, there were 88 in my graduating class (I distinctly remember the number 89, but maybe somebody is missing on the alumni page). Whether 88 or 89, 56 is a substantially smaller number, yet the population of the area has remained stable. My first assumption is that it reflects a higher drop-out rate, but the attendance rate for the school (95.7%) would seem to contradict that (though I don’t nkow how they compute that statistic). If it doesn’t reflect a higher drop-out rate, does it reflect a changing demographic?
More interesting, however, is the percentage of graduates pursuing a college education. In 2005-2006, 77% of the graduates went on to college (the state average for the same year was 76%). I downloaded my class roster and working purely from memory, and only those who I know went directly to college (I did not count several people who a decade or so later went to college, because the state doesn’t count them) calculated that 18.52% of my graduating class went to college.
77%, 18.52%. That’s quite a change, even over thirty-some years. But our class was full of farm kids, who went back to working on the farm once they graduated. It’s just the way things were. Still, a change of 58.48% is pretty dramatic, certainly larger than I would have expected to see. The obvious question, since the community hasn’t changed that much, is who’s going to be working the farms?
There was also a statistic for honors diplomas, but I have no idea what that means. We didn’t have honors diplomas. We had the top 10% of the class.
kderosa says:
The real stat we’re interested in is college graduation, not college attendance.
May 3, 2007, 2:32 pmrightwingprof says:
No way to get that data.
May 3, 2007, 4:05 pm