A new program at The Dalles High School aimed at helping struggling ninth graders has shown early promise, with improved grades and attendance among a small starting group of students.
The Check and Connect program, an intervention aimed at getting disenfranchised students more engaged in school, has matched six students one-on-one with mentors, most of them teachers.
The project started spring trimester and at the first “check-back” recently, Vice Principal Kurt Evans learned that four of the six students improved both their grades and attendance. One stayed the same on both counts and one had declines in both areas.
Plans are to grow the program a bit each year.
Evans said they were told at a training not to expect immediate results, but that growth would be slow.
A graduation rate for a class of just 200 or fewer students – which is typical for TDHS – is highly affected if even just a few students drop out. Just two students dropping out reduces the graduation rate a percentage point.
TDHS has dramatically improved its graduation rate in recent years, posting an 87.1 percent graduation rate last year, well above the state average of 75 percent.
The school’s benchmark has always been to have all students graduate, with the best transcripts possible, said Principal Nick Nelson.
The Check and Connect program focuses on students showing early warning signs of disengagement from school, or who are at risk of dropping out. The program is not just about preventing dropout, but about getting students to feel competent and successful.
In the program, mentors “check” student performance data weekly and “connect” with the student to build a trusting relationship and work toward improvement. They make a two-year commitment to work with students, their families and their teachers.
While the program is new to The Dalles, it is actually one of the more enduring and proven programs in education. It was created in 1990 by the University of Minnesota.
Over the years, the program has demonstrated the power of personalized interventions and shown that relationships are essential to behavior change and progress.
The program also learned that sticking to the program is critical, and that comes from effective leadership of the mentors.
It also found that students need to feel competent, to see schoolwork as relevant to future goals, and to feel like they belong.
Check and Connect calls for timely interventions, based on data, to keep the student engaged in school and learning.
The first step is establishing trust, Evans said, and showing students that mentors care about and believe in them. “It may be a level of caring the kid might not have experienced,” Evans said.
Mentors get to know their students, accept them as they are, but also hold them accountable.
Mentors are those who believe that all students, particularly those at risk, have abilities and strengths and can learn and change.
Mentors get to know students, such as their outside interests, and what they like about school, what their plans are; and work individually with them on problem solving and skill building. An important premise of Check and Connect is a shift in focus from preventing negative outcomes like dropping out to promoting student success and engagement.
“This is the way that we have to do business. It’s not just academics, its making the connection, building relationships with students, making connections with the disenfranchised students, making high school successful,” Evans said.
The high school is offering more programs than ever, both in terms of class offerings and in terms of providing student support.
One example is “growth mindset” training, which shows what teachers can do in the classroom to facilitate the idea that students can grow their capabilities, and that “failure is not the end of the world, I can learn with my failures,” Nelson said.
It teaches grit, perseverance, steadfastness and hard work.
The school is also finishing its second year of AVID, a class that teaches college preparatory skills like reading and writing techniques. The class will be offered to all four grades next year, and 24 middle school and high school teachers will get trained on it over the summer.
The Check and Connect mentors volunteered for the roles, Evans said, and most are teachers. Money from the state, funded through voter-approved Measure 98 geared toward reducing dropout rates, was used to send about 12 people to training, said Nelson.
The program has five parts: Identify a problem; list choices; choose one; follow through; and monitor results.
“You’re trying to get to the root of the problem,” Evans said. Poor attendance “is usually a symptom.”
Mentors are tasked with talking to students about the role of effort and personal choice, to encourage students to develop motivation to learn and perseverance.
The program targets students with poor attendance and grades. Research shows that once attendance falls below 90 percent, “everything starts going south,” Evans said. When attendance goes up, the grades follow, he said.
Mentors include a ninth grade teacher from each core subject at the high school -- math, science, social studies and language arts – plus a counselor and a person who handles discipline.
Nelson said the first two months of ninth grade are a critical transition period in terms of the eventual success of a student. Check and Connect will be a valuable tool to keep students on track and feeling successful, he said.
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