Carbon School District was named one of the top school districts for senior graduation rates in the state in a report that was recently released by the Utah State Board of Education.
In pure percentages, Carbon High School graduated 97 percent of the students who started the school as sophomores three years ago and Lighthouse High School graduated 95 percent. Overall the districts graduation rate was 96 percent.
“Only two schools in the state had higher graduation rates than our district,” said Carbon School District Board President Wayne Woodward during the monthly board meeting held on Dec. 9.
The numbers were revealed in the 2015 Cohort Graduation Rate report that came out just last week. Carbon District graduated 216 students in the last school year. Overall in the state 36,933 students graduated from school districts and charter schools.
The two schools Woodward referred to in the state that achieved better numbers than Carbon District were science and technology charter schools along the Wasatch Front. Both the Northern Utah Academy for Math, Engineering and Science and the Utah County Academy of Science had graduation rates of 98 percent.
Overall the report cited that statewide the graduation rate was 84 percent. That is an increase of one percent from 2014 to 2015. Since 2008 graduation rates have gone up in Utah by 15 percent. The report includes all students who began school as freshmen in the 2011-12 school year and includes students who transferred into the Utah public education system in ninth grade and higher. In the last five years alone the states graduation rate has gone up eight percent.
The state considers that there are four outcome categories of students in the calculation: those that graduate, those that drop out, students that continue their education and others who completed high school.
Graduates include only those who have earned a basic high school diploma or an adult secondary diploma. Other completers include those that are granted GED’s (take the General Education Development Test and complete it), those that get a Certificate of Completion and those with disabilities that participated in the Utah Alternative Assessment. Continuing students are those with disabilities (who can stay enrolled until they are 22), or those that enroll into an institution of higher learning without first getting their diploma. Dropouts are those that leave or or taken out of school for various reasons or take more than four years since their entrance into high school (ninth grade).
Continuing students and other completers actually constitute only about two to three percent of the cohort.
“We have people at the high school’s who work very hard on getting students through to graduation,” stated Judy Mainord, Carbon District’s secondary supervisor. “We also have a court system that supports us on truancy when we submit for it.”
District graduation rates among districts geographically surround Carbon include Emery with 91 percent, Grand with 88 percent, Duchesne with 84 percent, North Sanpete with 80 percent and Uintah with 81 percent.
Juab School District was the only district to match Carbon’s number at 96 percent.
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