
Education Week
In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains here in the northwest corner of South Carolina, high schools’ attempts to curb student dropouts may not match what many people picture when they hear talk of the nation’s “dropout factories.” Yet one-fifth of the 2,000 high schools nationwide categorized that way by researchers at Johns Hopkins University are in rural areas, some of them small schools where students get a lot of personal attention.
With 50 such schools, South Carolina tops all other states in the number of rural schools on the dropout-factory list, with Georgia and North Carolina not far behind. Nearly half of those South Carolina schools have fewer than 500 students.
**This article can be found online at its original publisher here.
A dropout prevention intervention training is taking place in rural South Carolina in July 2014. I commend the Edgefield County School District for taking the initiative to address this issue at their local site, as well as opening up the training to neighboring school districts.
http://checkandconnect.umn.edu/training_consultation/compimplementation_SC.html
Edgefield County School District is partnering with the Institute on Community Integration, headquarters of Check & Connect, to host this training.