At-risk. It’s a common term in education. It’s a scary term to most. No one wants their students to be considered ‘at-risk’, but the fact remains, certain criteria can make a student more or less likely to succeed, whether that’s completing the next grade or graduating high school. Educators have toiled for years, decades even, to understand what causes students to dropout and how they can resist.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average dropout can expect to earn an annual income of $20,241. That’s roughly $10,000 less than the typical high school graduate, and $36,000 less than someone with a bachelor’s degree. While the income potential is lower, the incarceration and unemployment rates are much higher for the high school dropout. More on the costs of high school dropout rates found here. It’s a problem. Everyone knows it. But how do we fix it?
1. Take a good look at your students
Not just aggregates, charts, and graphs. Not just school-level assessment scores. Every educator from the classroom to the district office should be able to look at individual students.
At SchoolStatus, we provide our digital Student Card. It’s all the information you would want on a student...including his or her full communication records.
It’s only on the student level that educators can See the Whole Student. It’s all important. It all matters. Three missed Fridays in a row and then a 64 on the next math test? It matters. Two disciplinary infractions disrupting the bus. Two phone conversations with the student’s mom where she shared the fact that they lack internet service at home? A holistic understanding of individual circumstances is important for supporting students success.
2 . Keep track of at-risk criteria...every single day.
Newsflash: students can change….fast. One day a student is doing fine in Algebra and then suddenly a few missed days, one bad test, and now she’s on a downward spiral. The SchoolStatus At-Risk Module tracks it all, and tracks it nightly.
Choose to monitor the factors most relevant to the makeup of your school district. Your custom module makes students who may have flown under the radar visible. Click on their name and within seconds you are looking at a full picture of their activity including notes, attachments, and longitudinal scores.
3. Identify and Measure Learning Loss
With achievement gaps and learning loss on everyone's mind, it's important to have a visualization that helps educators identify and measure student performance.
SchoolStatus offers custom dashboards to suit your district's unique needs and special populations.
4. Engage, engage, engage...and then engage again.
A student’s home life plays a huge role in the success he or she experiences at school. If we aren’t reaching out to parents to understand the intricacies of their home life, we aren’t fully understanding the student.
SchoolStatus allows teachers and administrators to make phone calls, send text messages, and emails directly to parents without revealing personal cell phone numbers and without requiring parents to download an app. Often times, parents don’t have the knowledge, skills, or information to help. Those extra phone calls or texts can be the difference in an engaged parent and thus, an engaged student.
It’s not a problem we’re going to solve overnight, but it’s a problem we can tackle a little bit easier with SchoolStatus’ tools for identifying, tracking, and engaging at-risk students to change trajectories. Because it matters.
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SchoolStatus is the district-wide communication tool that integrates key student data in order to increase communication among educators, district administrators, and student families. The company’s solution aggregates individual student data, such as state assessments, attendance, and grades in an easy-to-visualize format and offers the option to communicate with student families via call, text, or email. Through SchoolStatus, millions of communications have occurred on the classroom, campus, and district level. For more information about SchoolStatus, visit http://www.schoolstatus.com.
