Graduation rate among highest in the state

When it comes to graduation rates, Lumpkin County High School has once again reached new highs, scoring the highest rate in school system history for the third straight year while also placing third in the state for highest graduation rate.
For principal Billy Kirk, the achievement is the result of trusting and perfecting the process.
“It’s honestly a culmination of four years,” Kirk said. “When the strategic plan was put out four years ago when I took the job, I met with Dr. Brown and he felt like Lumpkin County could be a school system that should be consistently 95 percent or better graduation rate,” Kirk said.
Now, for the third straight year, LCHS exceeded the 95 percent mark, this year with a graduation rate of 98.41 percent. For Kirk, that’s the most important thing he could do in his job.
“That was one of the initiatives of our school was graduating kids,” he said. “Because when you graduate kids with a high school diploma, it changes their life for the better. They can get a job. They can go to college post-secondary. It opens up so many doors and two years in a row, every child that has stepped foot in that door has graduated and we’re so proud of that.”
The graduation rate is based on the school’s four-year adjusted cohort, which takes into account the total number of students as they enter ninth grade for the first time, instead of just the number of seniors that were scheduled to graduate. Kirk explained how the state figures the number.
“It’s kind of wacky math...If any student enters Lumpkin County High School in their four years...and let’s say they move to wherever and you don’t follow them and track them appropriately, they ding your graduation rate,” he said. “So the kids that we missed this year did not finish at Lumpkin County High School. There was I think four total kids that we ‘could not find,’ but it’s kids that were in our building for a year or less and transferred somewhere else and never finished high school. But it still dings Lumpkin County High School’s graduation rate because we are still responsible for those students.”
Kirk said that the graduation rate is audited each year by the state to ensure the numbers are true.
“What that audit does, to me, it validates the work,” he said. “...There’s no fudging the numbers. The numbers are the numbers...They go through every graduate and audit every single thing that we have.”
And perhaps the most impressive part of it all is that the all-time highest graduation rate was achieved in arguably the toughest school year to date. Kirk said that COVID-19 definitely brought extra challenges.
“Think about all the virtual kids that graduated last year and trying to manage them at home while doing everything else,” he said. “Our board of education and superintendent were 100 percent committed to making sure we were in school every day. That in itself changed everything because it give us the ability to do our job. Had we been virtual, when you have kids at home, you can’t guarantee success while a kid’s sitting at home. We’re not apologetic about the fact that we were in school last year. We’re not apologetic about the fact that if we weren’t in school, what just happened would be a lot more difficult to manage….The second piece of it was overcoming the obstacles of the virtual piece and the in-person piece and making all of that work and staying on top of it on a daily basis.”

STATEWIDE

Georgia’s high-school graduation rate remained steady this year despite the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Peach State posted a graduation rate of 83.7 percent for the 2020-2021 school term, down slightly from the 83.8 percent rate achieved during the previous term, the Georgia Department of Education reported Thursday.
COVID-19 forced school districts to make a series of adjustments during the last school year, with some resorting to virtual instruction for long periods but others able to get students back into their classrooms by exercising safety precautions included mask wearing and social distancing.
“Given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am pleased to see Georgia’s graduation rate holding steady,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods said.
“Combined with the class of 2021’s increases in ACT and SAT scores, this is an encouraging indicator about the work being done in public schools. Teachers and students have continued to succeed in the face of challenging circumstances.”
High-school graduation rates have risen steadily during the past decade. This year’s rate marked an increase of 14 percent over the class of 2012.
Meanwhile, two Georgia high schools—Berrien Academy Performance Learning Center and Clarkston High School—have been taken off a federal list of schools targeted for low graduation rates.
“An exit from CSI (Comprehensive Support and Improvement) status means a school has done hard work that produced measurable improvements for their students,” Woods said.

Dave Williams / Capitol Beat contributed to this article