The Problem
Some students will fall off track and require second-chance optionsEven with our best efforts to monitor student distress signals and establish programs that keep students engaged, some will fall off track and give up. These students often have life situations that create special needs. Some have to work to help financially at home. Others are overwhelmed by responsibilities for taking care of siblings or their own children. Due to grade retention or other disruptions, some are older than their classmates and don’t feel comfortable showing up at school.
These students need ways to reconnect with education. They need options that meet their needs and that enable and motivate them to re-engage academically and graduate.
Solutions
Project Recovery: Getting students back in school and on track to graduateLaunched in September 2008, this initiative reaches out to students who have dropped out. It deploys central office teams to our high schools each semester to find these students and re-enroll them in programs tailored to their needs and connected to ongoing support. The teams collaborate with principals and school staff to find and bring back students not showing up at school.
On the first day of each school year, between 100 and 125 students are missing at most of our high schools. Many have moved, transferred, or are still on family vacations and haven’t notified the school. Others have given up on school. Students who are dropping out don’t fill out forms to say so.
Armed with the names of missing students, the central office teams help schools find these students by making phone calls and home visits. The teams return to the schools throughout the school year and repeat the process for students who stop attending school throughout the year.
Once a student is “found,” school counselors and other staff work together to determine the student's academic status and personal situation and try to make a match with the right program from the district’s portfolio of second-chance options 
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Many of these options involve hours and schedules that are different from “regular” school. One critical piece is credit recovery , a way for students to make up missed course credit electronically. Other options include adult education programs involving community college courses and a new "virtual" high school where students can complete courses online, from home or anywhere.
Counselors also work to connect students and families with needed medical, mental health or social services, and to provide students with ongoing intensive one-to-one support and mentoring.
Goal of system change. As we continually refine this new initiative, central office and school site team leaders meet at the end of each “recovery” cycle to discuss outcomes. They compare notes about barriers or gaps encountered and brainstorm changes that can increase the district’s capacity to re-enroll these students and offer effective support that allows them to graduate and succeed.
Data on missing students are systematically updated so the impact of Project Recovery can be tracked. Stories of individual students are captured in writing, which offer a human understanding--beyond the numbers—of student experiences: where and how they begin to falter; and how we can better ensure they get needed help and support throughout their school years to thrive rather than fall through the cracks.
Resources
Reenrollment of High School Dropouts in a Large, Urban School District, by BethAnn Berliner et al, WestEd, 2008. See also the 2-page synopsis, What Happens to High School Dropouts Who Reenroll? This study follows a cohort of first-time 9th graders in San Bernardino, CA, from 2001/02 to 2005/06 and documents dropout, reenrollment, and graduation rates.
Grad Nation: A Guidebook to Help Communities Tackle the Dropout Crisis , by Robert Balfanz and Joanna Hornig Fox, Everyone Graduates Center; John M. Bridgeland, Mary McNaught, Civic Enterprises; commissioned by America’s Promise Alliance, November 2008.
The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts , by John M. Bridgeland, John J. DiIulio, Jr. and Karen Burke Morison, Civic Enterprises, March 2006.
