Credit recovery as a path to on-time graduation
Date
2019
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Students fail ninth grade more than any other grade in high school (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2011). Failure to recover credits at an accelerated pace threatens a student’s ability to graduate on time and increases the likelihood that a student will drop out of high school. This portfolio examines the impact of Garden Spot High School’s (GSHS) credit recovery (CR) program, the Spartan Academy, which has served students at risk of dropping out at Eastern Lancaster County (ELANCO) School District since 2015. At the end of the 2018 school year, the program was eliminated due to a grievance against the district. As a result, the district has integrated CR into its existing online programing – ELANCOnline (EOL). ☐ This portfolio begins with my efforts as the high school principal to complete a program evaluation of the Spartan Academy. Specifically, I was interested in the impact of the Spartan Academy on students at risk of dropping out at GSHS. I began by reviewing extant literature to identify best practices in CR throughout the country. The artifacts that I created based on this review illustrate my efforts to ensure a research-based approach as CR transitioned to the district’s online programming. I also interviewed former Spartan Academy students to understand what motivated them while they were enrolled in the program. I learned that students held a favorable opinion of the Spartan Academy and a majority of them acknowledged that they would not be on-track to graduate had they not been enrolled in the program. ☐ Graduation data supported these claims – multiple students who were enrolled in the Spartan Academy graduated on time. ☐ To inform CR as it transitioned to the district’s online programming, I recommended the implementation of consistent incentives as part of the CR program. In addition, I recommended that CR programming must be customized to meet the individual needs of each student. A majority of students who participated in the interviews attributed much of their success in the program to being able to work at their own pace. On-track indictors allow districts to identify students at risk of not graduating on time while students are still early in their academic career. ELANCO’s Early Warning System (EWS) allows the district to identify at-risk students and to support these students as they transition to GSHS. The final recommendation included evaluating ELANCO’s CR program annually and refining the program as needed so students, teachers, and administrators have a clear understanding of the impact CR has on students at risk of not graduating on time and dropping out.