By Pete Stidman
Special to the Reporter

Dropout rates in most city high schools are dismal. Jeremiah Burke High School's four-year dropout rate for 2006 was 28.2 percent, according to new numbers from the Massachusetts Department of Education. Noonan Business Academy (33.8 percent) and the Academy of Public Service (44 percent)- two of three schools housed at the Dorchester Education Complex- are much worse.

Ascertaining the cause of it all is about as simple as passing trigonometry without opening a textbook, but the folks at Boston Private Industry Council are getting some of the homework done. They've tried to contact all 1600 of the 2005-2006 school year's dropouts as part of a pilot program funded by the Carnegie Corporation.

"It's not about MCAS," said Marvin Moore, one of the three, sitting at his desk in a small corner office at PIC's downtown headquarters. "A lot of our dropouts have passed MCAS. It's important to people like us, or their teachers, but it's really not important to them, it's just kind of this thing in front of them."

"They don't really understand what's awaiting them when they get out of school," said Emannuel Allen, another outreach specialist. "In short, school needs to be more relevant to life."

Moore and Allen are former dropouts themselves, giving them special cache with the kids coming in their door, but they don't look the part. No doubt the ties and suit jackets are meant to contrast with the styles raging in high school hallways.

"Pop culture has them chasing a false image of what it is to be a man and a woman and what they're chasing," said Moore.

Pulling kids back to reality and back on track was their goal, and no one told them it would be easy. Out of the 1600 kids they sent letters to and tried to call, around 800 had bad contact information. Only 375 picked up the phone or called back. Of those, only 119 said they wanted to reconnect. 

"When they tried to help me it was too late," said Meraris Ortiz, 19, of her former alma mater, Brighton High School. "Teachers didn't notice that I had stopped going to school. When they did it was because I told them. It took them a year-and-a-half." 

BPS policy prevents administrators and staff from discussing individual students on the record, but even as an unconfirmed allegation, it illuminates what Ortiz was feeling when she left. Out of 141 kids asked why they dropped out during in-depth interviews, 38 cited a lack of support services.

"I wanted the help, I wanted the attention," said Ortiz. "By not going to school I was crying out for help, but it was invisible. The resources they gave me didn't really help. They tried to give me counseling but it was hard for me to open up at that time so it didn't really work for me."

If there is a thread connecting the majority of dropouts, it's the feeling that they aren't heard or cared about. Sometimes it narrows to a certain teacher, or results from the structure of the school, or widens to include the entire student body.

"Personally, I wasn't getting along with too many teachers," said Jamaal Sanders of Codman Square. He attended Hyde Park High School and dropped out in early November 2005 because the school had become "more of a hang out than a school" and he didn't get along with his math teacher and others.

Sanders claimed that his math teacher divided up his class, better students in the front row, poorly performing students in the back. When he complained about his position, he found a yellow folder on his desk that contained "easy math." He claims his teacher told him if he did this math instead, he could pass the class. 'Lack of a connection with a teacher' was a reason given by 27 kids interviewed by PIC.

"Me and him just didn't get along," said Sanders. "The man swore he knew me from inside out like I was just some average street kid, so that's how he treated me. When I asked for help it was like 'What's the point of me helping you if aren't going to go anywhere?' That was his whole attitude towards me, so I was like, 'to hell with me? Then to hell with you.'"

Again, Sanders' account of events is one-sided and can't be confirmed, but it does indicate the level of frustration some kids feel within BPS. 

TechBoston Academy, a pilot school in the Dorchester Education Complex, bucks the dropout trend. It has a scant 7.8 percent four-year dropout rate. Headmaster Mary Skipper said in a phone interview that a teacher would never get away with tactics like Sanders' math teacher's in her school. She adds, however, that kids need to learn how to get along, even with people they dislike.

"One of the things we realize is it is not about schools being smaller or being pilots, it's about schools being personal," said Skipper. "The bottom line is that education is about relationships, relationships between teachers and their students and between headmasters and their staff."

TechBoston looks very closely at each student for warning signs inside or outside of school, and addresses them. Teachers are trained to build on relationships with their students through role-playing and other exercises.

"I have three kids that dropped out this year, and I know who they are. I call them every week," said Skipper. "The goal is not necessarily to get them back. We can't always keep the kid but we can make that effort to let the kid know 'We missed you and we care about you.'"

But is this idea is trickling into the district schools from pilots like TechBoston?

"I think absolutely it is," said Skipper. "I think that the right conversations are starting to happen. We're not there yet and we may not be there for a while, but we're moving in the right direction."

Sanders is choosing to go after his GED and participate in the Year-Up program, as is Ortiz. Out of the 119 kids who wanted to reconnect with school in PIC's outreach effort, only 81 actually did in one way or another.

Out of those, 20 were enrolled to get their GED high school equivalent at the time of press, two have already achieved it, 24 were still enrolled in district schools and 16 are still enrolled in alternative diploma programs like Dorchester's Boston Day and Evening Academy. PIC's outreach program may turn around three to four percent of BPS's 2006 dropouts if all goes well. Ortiz is thinking about a career in information technology or financing. Sanders is chasing a career in computer networking and possibly web development on the side.

"When people hit their teenage years a lot of things change," said Ortiz when summing up why kids drop out of school. "You have to start learning how to fly. You want to be somebody, but you don't know what you want to be. But once you know, that's how you stay put."