HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — The number of high school seniors graduating from the Department of Education has dropped and while Guam Department of Education officials are not ready to say it’s a significant drop, they do attribute it to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The headquarters of the Guam Department of Education in Tiyan on April 4, 2021.
“If you look past years numbers on (Annual State of Public Education Report), every school decreased in the total number of graduates,” said Joseph Sanchez, deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction for GDOE.
For school year 2020-2021, there were 1,449 high school students who graduated. The report shows that the graduation rate increased from 87.3% in the 2018-19 school year to 88.9% in school year 2019-20. However, it noted that the numbers for the 2019-20 school year reflected students receiving their third quarter grades as their final grade as a result of Covid-19 shutting schools down.
By comparison, school year 2018-2019 was last full year uninterrupted by the pandemic. There were 1,871 graduates, according to the annual report.
Big drop
“This past year we see a big drop, I am not ready to say it’s a significant drop because we have a specific process to make that claim, but if you do the math right now, you can see there is a drop in the number of graduates,” Sanchez said.
“But under normal circumstances if you look at the trends from the previous years, not just the last two years but if you look at five years back, this year’s numbers do show a drop,” Sanchez added.
Looking back five years to the 2016-17 school year when GDOE numbers show there were 2,054 graduates.
Sanchez, however, could not provide factors contributing to this decline.
“We can speculate, obviously they weren’t in school for a long time, that would’ve made it difficult especially for the average student, students with the most challenges whether it be accessibility to technology or access to internet or just didn’t have the ability to pick up or drop off their assignments,” Sanchez said.
He said because of Covid-19 there are instances where seniors don’t have enough credits to graduate, some of them only having credits placing them in 10th grade, which means it may take another year for these students to earn enough credits for graduation.
“We were already worried last year that it would hit the most at-risk students hard, and I think now we are starting to see those numbers. The concerns we had are starting to show with these indicators,” Sanchez said.
Summer school
Sanchez said that the graduation numbers for summer school are up this year. There are 175 expected graduates as compared to 84 graduates in the 2019-20 school year.
A rainbow graduation is scheduled for July 26.
Although a push to graduate was seen by some seniors over the summer, the department has not taken an official count of how many students have dropped out of school, but Sanchez said it is low.
“The dropout rate is very low, but let me explain why that is not necessarily a good indicator. To be classified as a dropout the student has to do certain things. The student has to either withdraw and not graduate, if they don’t show up and they get dropped, or if they are expelled and don’t come back to school that is considered a dropout,” Sanchez said.
But all of the factors which indicate a dropout were not used by GDOE last year because of Covid-19. In fact, schools were directed not to drop students who didn’t have contact with the schools.
Sanchez acknowledged that this would result in an under-reported number of dropouts.
“We are going to have to work with schools to say look at the normal dropout reporting mechanism and see where we can correct that or update it because basically no one dropped out last year,” Sanchez said.
He clarified that while there may have been students who did in fact drop out of school last year, the official designation indicators were not triggered.
He said that information may not be available until the GDOE research division completes the official report but even at that the information may have to note that the data included is skewed.
In previous years, GDOE’s dropout rate has steadily declined. The 2019-20 dropout rate decreased to 2.5% as compared to 3.2% in the 2018-19 school year.
