Go Red Devils! The Associated Press has an article entitled 10 Indiana schools called ‘dropout factories’. Among them is my alma mater, Richmond High School. (We’re the only one outside of Indy and The Region to make the list — quite an honor).
It’s been 18 years since I graduated from there, so maybe it has gotten a lot worse. But, when I was there, I felt like I had the opportunity to get one of the best educations anywhere. It helped –a lot– that my parents had taught me to value my education, that school work came pretty easily to me, and that my friends and their families viewed education in much the same way. When I went to college, I met a lot of students who had come from some pretty nice private schools, and I never felt like my education was inferior to theirs. I can’t speak for the other schools on the list, and I suppose I can only speak for Richmond High School as it was many years ago, but at the time, good educational resources were available to the students.
On the other hand, it was a big school – I graduated in a class of about 400, and I think there were about 2,200 students spread over four years. I don’t doubt that it’s pretty easy for a student to get lost in the shuffle there. If you and your family aren’t that interested in education, I can certainly see where you could be allowed to disappear from RHS. I know several other commenters to this blog are graduates of Richmond High School, so maybe they’ll have a different perspective.
Anyway, the list:
–Arsenal Technical High School, Indianapolis: 22 percent promoted*, 44 percent graduation rate**.
–Manual High School, Indianapolis: 24 percent promoted, 48 percent graduation rate.
–Arlington High School, Indianapolis: 26 percent promoted, 52 percent graduation rate.
–Northwest High School, Indianapolis: 29 percent promoted, 54 percent graduation rate.
–Broad Ripple High School, Indianapolis: 34 percent promoted, 72 percent graduation rate.
–Richmond High School, Richmond: 53 percent promoted, 54 percent graduation rate.
–Roosevelt High School, Gary: 58 percent promoted, 42 percent graduation rate.
–Perry Meridian High School, Indianapolis: 59 percent promoted, 74 percent graduation rate.
–Wallace High School, Gary: 60 percent promoted, 47 percent graduation rate.
–East Chicago Central High School, East Chicago: 60 percent promoted, 62 percent graduation rate.
*Promotion rate: The percentage promoted shows how many students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. It covers regular and vocational high schools with three years of valid data and 100 or more students.
**Graduation rate: The graduation rate from the Indiana Department of Education includes factors such as transfers or retained students. Department officials say those numbers are a more accurate reflection of how many students stay in school.
Hoo boy, the poop’s gonna hit the fan in Perry Township…the only non-IPS Indy school on the list is Perry Meridian. I have to chuckle just a tad though, being a Southport grad (the other Perry Township high school), Perry Meridian’s rival, esp. since Perry had the “rep” of having more of the well-off, smarter kids…
I suspect they’ll just delude themselves into thinking it’s the fault of busing … says the guy who grew up in Perry Township and would have gone to PMHS if he hadn’t been fortunate to attend private schools instead.
I started college as a sophomore thanks to Richmond High School. And it still took me 4 1/2 years to graduate from college…
Yeah, but back in 1991 reservists were being dragged away from home because President Bush decided to fight a war in Iraq. It’s not like that would ever happen again.
I’m sure the dropouts were always there, it’s just they never came to school in the first place…that’s why they had to drop out. You never even got a chance to see them and/or notice they were missing. Knowing the crowd you ran with, I’m guessing you weren’t hanging out with anyone that was anywhere close to being a dropout loser. Okay some losers, but no dropouts *lol*
Oh probably – just with the hundreds of schools in Indiana, it’s surprising to see RHS in the top 10 along with the big city schools.
I think it’s a measure of why we’re in trouble on so many issues that this sort of “news” is immediately greeted by catcalls at rival schools and self-congratulations for attending private schools which wouldn’t let any of those at-risk dropouts through the doors in the first place. And this, of course, in the midst of a four-year strangling of inner-city school districts punished by phony “budget balancing”, then put under political strain by a manufactured crisis in property taxes which has, among other things, raised doubts over whether the remaining IPS elementary schools will finally get air conditioning. But we can find the money when it’s a matter of building our section of highway for cheap Mexican goods. Meanwhile, ten miles north of those dropout factories they play high school football in a stadium that’d be the envy of a lot of Division II schools.
Children grow up in poverty through no fault of their own, but they get less consideration than someone who builds a multi-million dollar house in Brushfire Canyon. Sooner or later many of these children become your problem whether you like it or not, whatever school you went to.
“Big City” is relative in Indiana, isn’t it? :-)
Division II, hell. Richmond’s Tiernan Center is the 5th largest high school basketball auditorium in the nation and can seat over 8,000 people. I’ll bet some Division I colleges wouldn’t mind playing in that kind of facility.
Doug-
Valpo’s stadium looks just like Tiernan Center, but does not have the seating at both end zones. Man we had a basketball facility! (BTW you forgot to mention that the Tiernan Center was closed down recently and scrubbed due to a MRSA outbreak; that also made our local paper here in the Region).
At my 20 year reunion I ran into a number of friends who have moved to the Centerville/Abington School distict (next town over) because RCS has declined that rapidly. And yes, we all talked about how blessed we were to have the teachers, facilities, and educational background that we received at RHS in the ’80’s.
2200/4 = 550 avg. per class
your class graduated with 400
do we then assume 150 dropouts? (72% graduation rate)
Yeah, assuming I’m remembering the numbers right after all these years. And, I’m not sure how the AP study calculates these things, but it could be that some of our 400 came from “legacy” students who were held back into our year and who might not count as a graduate for the purposes of that study.
Yeah, and there are lots of things wrong with my math… students don’t just all drop out their senior year… they start falling out presumably at 16-ish…so really it could have looked like these numbers at the end of the year:
Freshman 650
Sophomore 600
Junior 550
Senior 400
Which, if you even assume 0 attrition at the Freshman year (so say they started the year with 650 and ended it with 650) and compare that number to the number that graduated its *really* bad.
In Seattle, in 1981, my senior class started the year at over 500 and slightly less than 400 graduated in the Spring.
What would be interesting is to have them run the same calculations at 10 year intervals. Are the rates that much different than they were in 1997? 1987? 1977? etc.
What the heck, Doghouse? Sorry to have offended you with my reminiscence from my high school days & those of us at Southport being looked down on by quite a few (but not all) of those going to Perry Meridian. It certainly doesn’t mean I don’t think there are gross inequities in school funding esp. for “inner-city” schools…but Perry isn’t one of them. It’s problem, I don’t think, is one of funding, as opposed to a bone-headed school board, perhaps. Also, there ain’t a lot of poverty on the far-southside of Indianapolis, certainly not like inner-city Indy or East Chicago or Gary. I can’t speak about Richmond, don’t know enough about that situation, but I can say Perry Meridian on this list sticks out like a sore thumb & is gonna cause a lot of embarassment down there. And no, I don’t think building more highways is a good idea or wise use of money right now…
Glenn-
As an RHS alum I can say that Richmond also sticks out on this list like a sore thumb. Richmond has around 38,000 residents–more or less–and only one school district (with one high school). It encompasses every socio-economic group. For that reason alone it should be somewhere in the middle of the pack.
The year I graduated-1987-we had 428 graduate in my class. (Around 74%). Of that number were some single moms and girls who were second and third trimester pregnant. (I remember some of my friends taking bets on which girl would go into labor during commencement–tacky and immature when I think back on that memory). The reason I bring this up is that the teen preganancy rate has increased in Wayne County since the mid-1980’s. Somehow during the conservative Reagan years those girls were still staying in school and getting their diplomas. What has changed today?
FYI-I’m not saying that teen pregnancy is the ONLY problem facing RHS; however in talking to friends back at home it does seem like more girls are dropping out of school than in the past.
I too graduated from RHS – back when it was a three year HS in mid-80s – ABC News did a piece about RHS because the school offered students $100 each and discounts throughout the town to be in attendance since the attendance was so bad. We started with about 850 to 900 students the first year (sophomore year) and graduated with about 550 – math even those dropouts could do – LOTS. Of those 550, would guess about 100 started college, and maybe half of those finished college (very few returning to Richmond of course). My parents still live there – and on visits it is clear it is a place in decline. There are myriad old people, closed stores, shuttered homes. To add to the problem, the manufacturing which not only helped keep hourly workers employeed but also attracted professionals transplanted from other areas (and often with higher value on education that the “natives”) are no longer populating the town. I wouldn’t live there by choice, or send my own children to the Richmond public schools. That said, I do hope the students who are interested in a decent education can continue to thrive (it is possible there) and not be pulled down by the dropouts, underperformers and others not concerned with education.