Last modified: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 12:48 AM EDT AHS would face more scrutiny under new bill BY JIM HAND SUN CHRONICLE STAFF A bill pending in the state Senate would require school systems with high dropout rates like Attleboro to develop action plans to reduce their numbers. The bill by Senator Ed Augustus, D-Worcester, has a goal of cutting the statewide dropout rate in half by 2012. Augustus said more than 11,000 students drop out of Massachusetts schools each year, and studies have found that the problem has a social cost to the state of $108 million a year. His bill would require schools to identify students at risk of dropping out and provide programs to prevent them from leaving. Schools with a dropout rate of 5 percent or higher, such as Attleboro High School, would be required to develop a tracking system for students and develop anti-dropout programs with the help of the state Department of Education. Attleboro High Principal Donald Fredericks said the school already has programs in place to address the issue. He said one program is called credit recovery. It allows students who have failed a course to take remedial classes after school in the spring or during the summer to pass the course and get the needed credits toward graduation. He said 105 students took the course this spring. Another offering is called the bridge program, which provides freshmen who have failed a course 10 Saturday sessions to make up the work, he said. "Those are two really good examples," Frederick said. The Augustus bill cites a study by Northeastern University that details the economic hardships workers who dropped out of high school suffer. Some of the findings include: Only 55.2 percent of dropouts have jobs, compared with 73.4 percent of high school graduates. Dropouts earn $10,000 less per year than graduates and $34,000 less than those with a college degree. Over the course of a lifetime, a dropout can expect to earn $456,000 less than those with a high school diploma and $1.5 million less than someone who graduated from college. Seventy percent of prison inmates in Massachusetts were dropouts. Augustus wants the Department of Education to do a study of the causes behind the dropout rate and the best ways of combating it. An early indicator system that warns educators that a student is headed for trouble would be established under the bill. Fredericks said it is his experience that absenteeism and tardiness are two major problems that lead to a student dropping out. In city schools like Attleboro High, absenteeism and tardiness can be caused by a need for students to work late at night because of family financial problems, he said. The state released the latest figures for dropout rates last week. They showed that Attleboro - the only city school in the area - had the highest rate at 5.5 percent. Norton was second highest in the area at 4 percent. On the other end, Mansfield had the lowest rate at 0.6 percent. The bill was the subject of a hearing at the Statehouse last month and is now awaiting action from the education committee, where Augustus is the vice chairman.