While not totally unexpected, there was good news on the school attendance front in February.
At last week’s school committee meeting, Deputy Superintendent of Schools Adam Deleidi presented the monthly indicators of success for the district, including attendance and the drop-out rate.
The district compares the prior month’s attendance rates to the month previous to that, as well as the year-to-date attendance to the previous year at the same time, Deleidi said.
“In the month of February in all grades, we beat our attendance rates over January with the exception of grade two, which started exactly the same at 91.5 percent, and our post graduate,” he said. “Everyone else actually improved their attendance rates.”
Compared to this time last school year, Deleidi said every grade is on pace to have a better attendance rate, with the exceptions of grades six and nine.
“Now, before we get too excited, I will say … last year we were dealing with the tripledemic of flu, Covid, and RSV,” said Deleidi. “We talked about that last year, so we expected improvements, but we are glad that we are seeing them here.”
While the attendance rate has seen improvement, there has been a slight increase in the dropout rate for the current school year.
So far this year, there have been 95 drop outs, while at this time last year, there were 75, Deleidi said.
“We do have more students this year, so the percentage of students who had dropped out at this point last year was 4.25 percent, this year at this point it is 5.13 percent,” said the deputy superintendent.
The dropout rate was highest for multilingual students at 9.7 percent. The rate for students with disabilities was 3.63 percent, and for students who are both multilingual and have special needs was 6.95 percent. The drop out rate for students who are neither multilingual nor have special needs was 2.78 percent.
There was good news with the dropout rate, as Deleidi said only one student dropped out in February, and that student was redirected to an adult education program.
Overall in February, the district saw 59 new students while 37 left the district.
“We continue the pattern of more students enrolling than they are leaving,” said Deleidi.