Attleboro High School lowered its ninth-grade retention rate by 21 percent last year, but freshman year continues to be a problem throughout the state.

The rate of students being held back after their first year in high school is far higher than any other year of schooling.

Attleboro, for instance, retained 10.9 percent of its freshman last year, but only 0.2 percent of its eighth graders.

Foxboro kept back 5.4 per cent of freshmen and no eighth graders.

Jackie Proulx, the outgo ing principal at AHS, said a big reason the freshman retention rate is higher at most schools is the state MCAS tests. In 10th grade, the tests become a requirement for graduation.

She said many high schools will not promote a freshman who has failed math or English because it is felt they will likely fail the 10th-grade MCAS tests.

The policy at AHS is a stu dent must get 35 credits to earn promotion.

She said it is possible to fail either math or English and move on, but not both.

Proulx said even without the MCAS, freshman year is a challenging one for teenagers. Students at that age are changing emotional ly and physically and the adjustment to high school is difficult, she said.

In Attleboro, freshmen go from three small middle schools to one high school with about 1,600 students.

`` In ninth grade, the most important thing to a kid is being accepted by their peers,'' she said. `` It's a growing up issue.''

North Attleboro High School Principal Robert Gay said freshman year is a transitional one and that students must learn to cope with more personal responsibility.

He said in grades one through eight students are usually promoted based on their maturity.

In high school, however, students must earn the required amount of credits to move on. Gay said at a previous school system he worked at the superintendent had a policy of not allowing eighth graders to be held back.

The thinking at that school system, he said, was that struggling students could get the extra help they need in high school. That is not the policy in North Attleboro, he said.

In 2004-2005, 1.1 percent of North Attleboro eighth graders were held back compared to 2.4 percent of freshmen.

Lynne Yeamans, assistant professor of secondary education at Bridgewater State College, said the reasons could go beyond social and academic.

She said middle schools have team teaching models and students are part of smaller groups.

High school is much different, she said, with students attending several different classes with different teachers and classmates.

Yeamans said she would like to see high schools become more like middle schools in their structure. That way teachers can better know their students and tailor their instruction to their needs, she said.

She also questioned the wisdom of holding students back.

Retained students tend to eventually drop out of high school, she said.

Repeating a grade often consists of taking the small courses taught in the same way that did not work the first time, she said.

Schools must find a way to identify at-risk students and give them the academic and social help they need, she said.

For Attleboro, the latest state report offered some promising news.

Two years ago, the freshman retention rate at AHS had jumped to 13.8 percent.

The rate for last year dropped to 10.9 percent, which Proulx said was more typical of a urban high school.

Still, she said, the rate is too high and school officials have to keep working to get it lower.

The loss of adjustment counselors due to budget cuts made the situation more difficult, she said.

Often students fail, get held back, or drop out of school because they have a problem outside of school, many times at home, she said.

Adjustment counselors can help those students, she said.

In its annual report on retention rates, the state Department of Education said absenteeism is a major contributor to students being forced to repeat a grade.

The state found that retained students missed an average of 25 days of school a year.

Students who got promoted missed an average of only nine days.

Proulx said absenteeism is often a symptom of another problem and hurts student performance.

Students miss school, fall behind in their work, start failing and cannot catch up.

`` Once you fall behind it is like a landslide,'' she said.

The state also found that Latino and African-American students had a higher retention rate than whites and Asians.

Most area school systems had an overall retention rate below the state average of 2.6 percent.

Bristol County Agricultural School in Dighton continued its tradition of having no students held back.

Mansfield had an overall retention rate 0.1 percent.

Foxboro, Norfolk, Seekonk, Plainville, Wrentham, Foxboro Charter, Dighton-Rehoboth Regional, and Norfolk Agricultural schools were all under 1 percent.

Attleboro, at 3.2 percent, and Norton at 2.9 percent were the highest in the area, although both were down from the year before.

Norton, however, saw its freshman retention rate jump from 6.9 to 9.8 last year.

Tri-County Regional Technical School in Franklin went from zero to 4.4 percent.

On the other hand, the Foxboro Charter School dropped its freshman retention rate from 6.8 to zero.