MASSP News Center

Middle schools try new ways of advancing students who were held back

Samiha Khanna, Staff Writer

It’s easy to spot middle school students who have been held back. They loom over other students, and sometimes they are taller than their teachers, too. They know their way around every corner of the school. And it seems as though every teacher knows them and their parents.Now, at many middle schools in the Triangle, teachers, parents and principals say they are going to extraordinary lengths to help overage students catch up.

Letting such students stay behind sharply increases the chances they will drop out once they arrive in high school discouraged, embarrassed and nearly old enough to graduate.

“You’ve got to confront the brutal facts,” said Patrick Rhodes, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction in Durham. “When you have too many students dropping out and you have clear research that shows grade retention does not work, then you need to adjust what you’re doing.”

The number of high school dropouts is at a five-year high, according to a report released earlier this year. More than 22,000 students in the state left school last year without a diploma. Legislators and local leaders are on a mission to keep kids in school. They’re using millions of dollars in grant money, new laws and whatever else it might take.

At Clayton Middle School, it could take the SOAR program — Students on the Academic Rise — for Brian Boyd to reach high school.

At 15, Brian looks like a grown man among his peers. He was supposed to be in seventh grade again this year.

But Principal Debbie Woodruff moved Brian and five other overage students up one grade level after the first nine weeks of school. They and their parents signed contracts agreeing to go to study halls, have their completed homework and school planners signed daily, and meet with a mentor weekly.

When students struggle, there is a support system ready to step in. Brian, for instance, gets a ride from Assistant Principal Eddie Price every morning. The administrator brings the teen into the school’s main office every morning to help him get assignments done before the first bell.

Everybody’s problem

Helping overage students is a national challenge, educators say. The threat is not only that they’ll be too old in high school and drop out. Many too-old students also lose motivation and become hard for teachers to discipline. Some parents also worry that repeating students can hurt the performance of the whole class.

“It doesn’t sit well with parents,” said Githens Middle School teacher Christina Lee. “It doesn’t sit well with me, and I’m not even a parent. … It’s important for students in different age groups to be among their peers.”

Some students are overage at the beginning of the school because their birthdays are near a district’s cutoff date and their parents waited a year to put them in school.

Most overage students have repeated a grade, whether they struggled with academic or behavior problems, had limited English skills or a disability.

Two years ago, Rhodes and other Durham administrators were looking at high schools and noticed classrooms were teeming with older students, many of whom had failed early on — as early as kindergarten, Rhodes said. Though some would argue otherwise, Rhodes said scores of studies show retention doesn’t help students in the long run.

“That’s not even talking about the stigmatization that goes along with it,” he said.

In Durham, teachers and principals decide who moves to the next grade, and most often, that’s based on grades, Rhodes said. Sometimes, parents ask schools to retain their children because they don’t think they’re ready for the next level. In some cases, students pass state end-of-grade exams, but are hampered by failing grades in the classroom.

In Durham, 7 percent of kindergartners failed in the 2002-03 school year, according to district data. A year later, 6.5 percent failed.

Alarmed, school leaders hauled in elementary school principals and showed them research that retentions don’t improve academic achievement, Rhodes said.

Now, kindergarten retentions hover just over 2 percent. Still, the years when elementary principals were failing many more has created a middle-school bulge.

The solution at Githens

Kitty Brawley has worked with overage students for the past two years at Githens Middle School, where more than 200 students are at least one year older than their peers in the same grade, according to school and district-wide data.

“We have a problem,” Brawley said. “And we’re going to take care of it rather than just pass it on.”

Each year, Brawley rounds up the oldest eighth-grade students and tells them and their parents she’s pushing them out of the nest — provided they agreed to flap their wings.

With emphatic commitment from students and their parents, Brawley readies the eighth-graders for high school, including teaching appropriate behavior and study habits. Fifteen students were moved to ninth grade halfway through the year, she said.

This year, for the first time, Brawley is doing the same with seventh-graders who really should be in eighth grade.

One recent morning, while talking about the students’ achievements, Brawley had to pause and wipe the tears glistening in her eyes.

The program has given student Vicky Hernandez redemption. The quiet 14-year-old said she failed fourth grade because she was a foster child at the time, and was being pulled out of class to deal with her life outside of school, she said.

“I thought I was dumb,” Vicky said softly. Now she realizes her capabilities.

“I feel really lucky,” she said. “I’m happy that I was picked out of all those students to be moved up.”

Test scores a concern

Not everyone favors putting these students on the fast track.

Laine Hindley, the principal intern at Githens, said some teachers don’t want students who were supposed to fail moved into their classes. They worry it might lower test scores.

“You have to ask, are we doing what’s best for our test scores, or are we going to do what’s best for our kids,” Hindley said. “Now, the teachers are sort of warming up to it.”

‘We can’t mess up’

At Brogden Middle School in Durham, almost a quarter of the students were at least one year older than their peers when they entered school in August, according to age and enrollment data provided by the district. Forty students, or about 4.8 percent, are two years older or more.

More than 30 percent of students at Chewning, Neal and Lowe’s Grove middle schools also are technically overage. Instead of promoting students mid-year, the programs at Chewning and Lowe’s Grove move students up after nine weeks, so they don’t miss so much instruction. They are constantly tracked.

“There are some that can pull it together just long enough to show that they can move up, and then they sort of lose focus,” said Lowe’s Grove Interim Principal Eric Johnson.

Principals and teachers know they can pour extra time, money and attention into some students and still not be successful.

Tevin Armstrong, 15, a student at Durham’s Jordan High School knows it, too, he said. The round-faced, talkative teen was one of Brawley’s students at Githens last fall, where he was a year behind. This spring he has managed to earn A and B grades in his first semester at Jordan High School.

Despite his own successes, Tevin has watched another boy from Githens, who moved up with him, fail. That student will have to repeat ninth grade.

“Every time I think about not doing my homework, I think about what Ms. Brawley said,” Tevin said. “We can’t mess up at all, or we’ll be back where we started.”