Dropouts Getting Help in Making a Comeback

It has been almost four years since 16-year-old Ruben Verdusco has been in a classroom.

The Jordan High School 10th-grader dropped out after the seventh grade and watched his dream of earning a high school diploma grow dimmer as school became a distant memory.

But today, Verdusco is back in the classroom, making steady progress toward graduation in a special Jordan High program that uses individualized instruction to keep dropout-prone students in school.

Called the “CORE” program because it focuses on the four core subjects in high school curriculum--math, science, English and social studies--the program allows students to learn at their own pace until they catch up with their peers and can return to regular classrooms.

“It’s to bring kids back who have been out of school for a while,” said Jordan Assistant Principal Andrea Natker, who helped institute the program last year.

Prevents Failure

“They come back in the middle of the year and they’re 10 weeks behind their classmates,” she explained. “You put them back in a regular class and they’ll fail. Then we’re back where we started, with a student who does not feel good about school and is probably going to stop attending.”

The CORE concept--borrowed from techniques used to teach newly arrived foreign students and others at Los Angeles’ alternative high schools--is designed to bring students’ skills up to a level that improves their chances for success in a traditional classroom setting, and to help them readjust to life on a high school campus.

It is aimed at dropouts who have been away from school for a long time, youngsters who enroll in school at mid-term, and students whose sporadic attendance or classroom problems have left them far behind their classmates--all common problems among Jordan’s transient, low-income student population.

Housing Projects Nearby

Situated in Watts, next to one of the area’s four public housing projects, the high school has long struggled with the problem of attracting and holding area teen-agers.

A variety of circumstances--including family financial problems that make work more attractive than school, a high rate of pregnancy among girls and the lure of drugs and gang activity--help make the school’s enrollment the lowest in the district, and its dropout rate among the highest.

Jordan ranks eighth among the school district’s 49 high schools in student attrition, with 51% of those who start Jordan in the 10th grade failing to graduate. Those figures do not take into account the fact that more than one-third of the school’s 1,176 students are absent on any given day, and that many neighborhood students, like Verdusco, drop out before they reach high school.

Habitually truant from classes at Bethune Junior High in South-Central Los Angeles, Verdusco stopped attending at 13 when he failed the seventh grade. “I was ditching so much, they flunked me,” he explained. “I didn’t want to do the seventh grade over, so I didn’t come back.”

Working, Hanging Out

He stayed away for two years, working odd jobs and hanging out with his friends. But he learned that the life of a dropout isn’t an easy one, and after two years out of school, he wanted to go back.

“I wasn’t making good money, and most places you need a diploma from high school,” he said. “But when I tried to come back (a year ago), they said I’d have to start in the eighth grade.” At 15, Verdusco wasn’t willing to sit in class with 13-year-olds while he caught up, so he stayed on the streets for another year.

Then he heard about the CORE program, where he could enroll as a 10th-grader in the small, individualized classroom and work his way back into regular high school classes. “I wouldn’t be back (in school) if it wasn’t for this,” he said.

After one month in the program, his teachers say Verdusco is almost ready to join a regular 10th-grade science class, and he may be enrolled in all 10th-grade classes by the semester’s end.

The only program of its kind among Los Angeles public high schools, CORE was started at Jordan in September. It costs the school nothing, Natker said, because it uses empty classrooms, unassigned teachers and parents as volunteers.

Growth Expected

About 15 students are enrolled for all or part of the day now, but attendance is expected to grow as the semester goes on. By last semester’s end, more than 60 students had participated in the program, and there was a waiting list of others who were interested.

It is too soon to tell how much CORE will cut the school’s dropout rate, but it is so popular among teachers, students and parents at the school that district officials have agreed to evaluate it at the year’s end as a model for other schools with dropout problems.

“We don’t have any statistics on the program yet, but I do know it has some youngsters attending school who would not have been in school had we not had that kind of a program,” said Elroy McGlothen, former Jordan High principal who is now an administrator in the district’s senior high division.

“Before this, kids started off trying to catch up with youngsters who’d been there 60 or 70 days longer than they had. They were just doomed to failure, so naturally, they were reluctant to come back (to school),” McGlothen said.

Can’t Save Them All

School officials know from experience that not all the CORE students will stay in school--several dropped out last semester--but they believe the program’s individualized instruction benefits even those who leave without graduating.

“Some will inevitably drop out, but they can strengthen their basic skills (in CORE) the way they couldn’t do in regular classes, so they’ll have a better chance of succeeding at whatever they do,” said Carolyn Powell, the school’s attendance coordinator.

“If they just get the idea that ‘I can study and can pass something,’ and they learn to ask questions and use resources, they’re better off than if they’d been in a regular classroom,” Powell said.

Powell recruits students for the program, with help from neighborhood parents who visit the families of truant children and explain the program.

“Most of them won’t just walk in and ask for help; you have to reach out to them and make them feel welcome,” Powell said. “When we let them know there’s this alternative, most of them jump at the chance to make up what they’ve missed. Some of them are so far behind, they’d given up hope.”

Giving Them Confidence

CORE program coordinator Jestine Enge is a school psychologist-turned-teacher who concentrates on giving her charges ample doses of hope and self-confidence, believing that feeling good about themselves “makes it easier for them to stay in school.

“A lot of the kids are intimidated by big classes and a large campus when they first come back,” she said. “They can feel comfortable in here, and they get a sense of achievement that they wouldn’t get in a regular class.”

Teachers from each of the four core subjects join Enge in the classroom, meeting individually with students to go over assignments and answer questions.

So far, the personal attention seems to have paid off, Natker says. “There’s a sense of closeness in the program that the students like,” she said.

“The ones who have been integrated in regular classes have done well and been successful. But our only difficulty now is convincing the others to go. They like (the CORE program) so much, they don’t want to leave. These are kids who . . . hated school.”