This report presents the recommendations of the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) concerning issues in data collection on school exit status. Of major concern were: (1) the high proportion of students exiting with status unknown, (2) the extreme state-to-state variability in reports of basis of exit, and (3) the incomparability of the OSEP data with other sources of information on high school completers and dropouts. The following recommendations are given: (1) add a count of students who died; (2) alter the definition of a dropout to include students not currently enrolled who did not exit through defined bases; (3) add a count of students who returned to regular education; (4) alter the definition of graduation with a certificate to include students who received a General Education Diploma through a secondary school program; (5) eliminate the category previously called "status unknown" and replace with "moved, not known to be continuing"; (6) use the December 1 child count from the previous year as the denominator in computing rates; and (7) change the time period covered by data collection from September to June to December 1 to November 30. Attachments include descriptions of current dropout and graduation statistics and a draft of proposed instructions and forms for collecting exiting data. (DB)