Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet’s sense of urgency brought Kahlia James to her front door early Saturday.
Bennet was on the former Manual High student’s porch before 9:30 a.m. as part of his effort to find every student displaced by the school’s closure in May and make sure they are attending classes.
It is a difficult road for some of these students, though.
The majority of them are taking buses to new high schools miles from their neighborhood and their friends. Roughly half of Denver’s students city wide don’t finish school as it is, and researchers estimated that at Manual, before its closure, 75 percent didn’t finish each year.
“It’s a lot of people,” James told Bennet, after he asked about how she liked her new school, East High, where there are about 2,000 students.
There were 558 students left without a neighborhood school when board members decided to close Manual for a year because of low student achievement and a shrinking student population.
Of those students, DPS administrators estimate about 440 students are attending city schools. Of those, almost half have attended fewer than 84 percent of their classes since school started a month ago.
Administrators won’t know until October – after the Oct. 2 official student count day – how many of those students are attending classes regularly. Bennet has called the tracking a three-year effort, though Saturday was the last day of door-to-door canvassing.
Steve Dobo is acting as a sort of dropout sleuth for 30 or so kids who are at the highest risk of dropping out. Some of them have yet to show for school, some have moved, and some attended the first week but haven’t attended since.
“We’re like detectives, almost,” said Dobo, executive director for Colorado Youth for a Change. “We’re trying to unravel where these students are.”
Dobo has found students who quit school because they have to take care of younger siblings; some have to work to help their families; a few are homeless.
When he finds them, he tries to get them into a program that fits their needs, if they have work or have child-care responsibilities.
Dobo said he believes in giving kids “third, fourth and fifth” chances. He also said almost all the kids he’s contacted want a real diploma, not a GED.
“You’re talking to some of these people for the first time about education. They have never been told before how important it is to finish,” he said.
Desirée Pigford was waiting on her porch when Bennet and chief academic officer Jaime Aquino walked across her lawn Saturday.
Pigford has been struggling with geometry at Thomas Jefferson High, and she holds a five- day-a-week job that has kept her from getting a tutor.
Aquino and Bennet urged her to try to find someone to help Saturdays, when she doesn’t work.
Bennet said this effort was “everything we could have done, and there’s still more to do.”
“The one thing that is clear is that there is more we can do to keep kids in school,” he said. “It takes a lot of work.”
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-954-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
