The Reading (Pennsylvania) School District, in conjunction with local youth and family services, has developed a program to address the needs of unwed mothers. Its goals are to reduce their dropout rate and to provide support services including child care, transportation, counseling, health care, and instruction in parenthood skills.(TE)

To reduce its dropout rate, Ohio County Schools in Wheeling, West Virginia implemented a multifaceted, sequential intervention plan. Its success indicates that direct, personal, immediate, and caring communication with parents and students remains the most effective and least costly way to link home with school. (Author/LHW)

Education is the most important key to racial progress in the United States. Leaders of historically Black colleges must seek financial stability for their institutions, develop programs to redeem talented Black dropouts and push-outs, and implement a curriculum that addresses the concerns of the Black community. (GC)

From among factors theoretically considered relevant to preventing school dropouts, empirical procedures identified five variables that predicted most of the variance among marginal youth: (1) extent of misbehavior in school; (2) belief in school's relevance to employment; (3) feelings of success in school; (4) parental monitoring of behavior; (5)…

Poor kids quit attending school because they need money for personal or family needs, they cant' compete with their peers financially, their parents don't value education, and/or the curriculum is not geared toward their needs. Work study funds, school-parent communication, curriculum revision and extracurricular participation could reduce their…

Pace University's efforts to attract and retain adult students include contacting nonmatriculated students to encourage commitment and resolve problems and contacting part-time students the first semester they stop attending. The results of the university taking the initiative have been increased retention and greater information about student…

What can parents do to make sure their children with disabilities stay in school and graduate? Be involved. Research shows that one of the most essential strategies for promoting school completion and achievement is family involvement. When families remain involved in their children's middle and high school education, students are more likely to…

"ALAS," an acronym for "Achievement for Latinos through Academic Success" that means "wings" in Spanish, is a middle school (or junior high school) intervention designed to address student, school, family, and community factors that affect dropping out. Each student is assigned a counselor who monitors attendance,…

This report includes state summaries of the annual dropout rate used in the accountability system, along with state attrition rates. It offers a series of longitudinal secondary school completion/student status rates. Out of 1,794,521 students attending Texas public secondary schools during 1999-00, 23,457 dropped out, a decrease of 15.0 percent.…

Studies indicate investments in social programs that raise a poor working mother's income may be especially beneficial to her children when they are of preschool age. Other studies show that high-quality preschool education interventions can have long-term beneficial impacts on school dropout, lifetime earnings and incarceration rates for…

The purpose of this descriptive study was to identify factors related to dropout/retention for distance education students in order to identify variables that might promote participation through completion. The major focus of the study was to document the distance education students' learning progress and to identify variables that relate to their…

The National Dropout Prevention Center designed a project, Student Serving Students, to see if students in kindergarten through twelfth grade could help other students who were at risk of dropping out of school. Communities in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina developed a variety of ways for students to meet the needs of children at risk.…

Students who eventually drop out of school have a long-term disadvantage in becoming productive citizens. The traditionally structured U.S. high school system does not facilitate high school education for at-risk students. Some schools, however, do organize themselves around the needs of the at-risk student population. This study analyzed the…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of summarizing Indicator 1--Graduation--for the analysis of the 2005-2010 State Performance Plans (SPP), which were submitted to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in December of 2005. The text of the indicator is as follows: Percent…

Alternatives in junior high, middle, and intermediate schools run the gamut, the researchers of NASSP's exemplary program files discovered. A few of them are described in this article. (Editor)