BRUNSWICK

More students are graduating from Brunswick High School and fewer are dropping out, according to numbers from administrators recently confirmed by state education officials.

Brunswick ended the 2012-13 school year with a dropout rate of 1.06 percent — nine students out of 847. That’s down from a peak of 5.4 percent in 2006-07.

Inversely, the graduation rate has risen each year since 2010, peaking after last year at nearly 94 percent.

The Maine Department of Education charts graduation rates according to segments of four-, five- and six-year student groups called cohorts.

Brunswick’s matriculation among its fouryear students is 93.8 percent. Among the fiveyear cohort, Brunswick graduates 91.2 percent of its students; for six-year, the rate dips slightly to 90 percent.

Each of the rates meets a standard set in 2010, when legislators passed a law requiring all publicly funded secondary schools to meet a 90 percent minimum graduation rate by 2015-16.

Administrators and state officials attribute the positive trends to several factors, including alternative education programs developed in the town’s high and junior high schools to catch “problem students” early and keep them on track to graduate.

Brunswick Junior High School started its “Response to Intervention” program in 2008.

At the high school, Freshman Academy launched in 2009 and was followed in 2010 by Sophomore Academy.

The programs each address differences in the ways students learn.

The lessons don’t change; alternative educational curricula are identical to traditional classroom expectations. It’s just that the method of delivery is modified.

Regardless, the experiment seems to be working — so well, in fact, that other schools have sent emissaries to Brunswick to learn about it, including Mt. Ararat and Morse high schools.

“Each year since the Academy program was established, the local graduation rate has gone up and the dropout rate has gone down,” said Greg Bartlett, the district’s assistant superintendent.

Richard Bergeron, an analyst in the state’s Department of Education, concurred with the district’s findings.

The department devised a stricter, more specialized method of noting and accounting for dropouts in 2010, which makes the local retention effort all the more remarkable.

Longtime Assistant Principal Donna Borowick, due to retire this month, instituted Freshman Academy at Brunswick High School in 2009. Shortly afterward, Sophomore Academy was added to retain kids who had made progress during their first year but not enough to risk full immersion in conventional classrooms.

She approached the school board with a proposal to identify students whose inclass performance fell short of their native abilities and to enroll them in a parallel educational track to keep them from spiraling out.

After the board gave its approval, Borowick took charge of implemention.

Success at the high school level begins with scrutiny near the end of junior high school. For some kids, it can be as simple as rearranging their perception of education and what it means.

“Historically, more kids drop out in ninth grade than any other,” Bartlett said, because that’s when discomfort in the classroom becomes acute. Lessons missed early get much tougher to makeup the further students progress, he said.

Early intervention

Conan McNamara was among the first people hired to start the Response to Intervention program at Brunswick Junior High School.

“Originally, it was me and eight students,” McNamara said. “Now there’s 12 students, me and one education technician who works with class.”

BJHS’s program is open to all students in the seventh and eighth grades, but only 12 are admitted in a given year.

“It’s an academic elective. Students have to apply to get in,” McNamara said. “The ones who get in are not satisfied with how school is going for them. They learn in many different ways, and this is an opportunity to have many different options for them to meet curriculum standards.”

It’s a short-term solution. Many — but not all — of the students who go through the junior high program end up in conventional high school classrooms. Others continue in the Academy Program throughout secondary school.

“How they think about school is a huge part of how they do in school. If they’re lacking confidence or feeling anxious, it escalates and just gets worse from there, and they’re the ones who end up dropping out,” McNamara said. “Every kid in this school can learn and learn well, but not necessarily in the same way.”

Secondary alternatives

At the high school, Jon Riggleman is one of nine alternative education instructors or counselors who find various means of helping students get past learning blocks.

Asked about the implementation of the Academy programs, Riggleman was deferential, crediting all of the schools’ staff and faculty with meeting students’ needs.

State-confirmed analysis demonstrates that establishment of the Academies corresponded with a dramatic and measured turnaround in the schools’ rate of dropouts.

The rate of students dropping out declined from 4.5 percent to 2.7 percent after the first year of Freshman Academy. In years two through four, it tapered even more — to 2.38, 2.02 and 1.06 percent, respectively.

“One fewer student dropping out, and we’d have been under 1 percent,” Riggleman said. “That’s about a 76 percent reduction in the dropout rate over four years.”

About 38 students enroll in Freshman Academy each year, with 10 percent making the transition to conventional or vocational classrooms at the start of their 10thgrade year.

Academy class sizes are smaller and are scheduled during the morning when youths typically are most alert. They also meet every day for 42 minutes, which allows for continuuity of instructor and subject matter.

Study halls, too, are aligned so that any student can visit with any of his or her teachers during that time for help.

However, it’s not a “school within a school” model; after lunch, Academy students take the same electives and classes as their peers.

“We can focus more on individual learning needs and pay a little more attention to the social and emotional elements of how a student is doing,” Riggleman said. “But it’s important to note that we follow the same curriculum, we use the same books, as every other class.”

jtleonard@timesrecord.com