Effective Programs to Help at-Risk Teenagers Stay in School

Boys and Girls Clubs

• Currently 4,000 Boys and Girls Clubs span the country to provide care and education for youth during the times they are out of school. They have made on-time graduation from high school a priority by encouraging students to succeed academically, become involved in their communities and take responsibility for themselves. They have incorporated a dropout prevention program targeted at at-risk youth with the primary strategy being to involve the student in a one-on-one relationship with a mentor and work closely with the school to develop the necessary skills to graduate on time.

Diplomas Now

• Diplomas Now is a program researched and designed by Balfanz, in his work at Johns Hopkins University, in which he partners with nonprofit groups and focuses on the sixth and ninth grades, those critical transition years to middle and then to high school. As of 2013 he has placed the program in 44 schools across the country with plans to place it in 20 more schools within the next two years, and says it is well worth the initial cost of the $30 million it took to implement it. The premise of his idea is what he calls the ABC method, using attendance, behavior and course performance as the skeleton on which success is built. This holistic approach involves everyone -- administration, teachers, parents and college-age mentors -- with each one having different responsibilities for keeping students on track. According to Balfanz, data show that chances of graduating from high school can go from 25 percent to 75 percent with this approach.

Check and Connect

• Check and Connect is a research-based intervention that develops a relationship between the student and a mentor who partners with salient stakeholders -- parents, teachers, counselors and community service providers -- to keep students motivated. Monitors keep track of the students' progress and connect personally with them to help solve problems, build skills and improve competence. Implemented in more than 27 states, this comprehensive approach focuses on finishing high school as the mentor tracks the students from one step to another. According to Check and Connect, their research has shown that since its inception, it has improved the dropout rate, the truancy rate and student and family engagement through the mentor-student relationship.

Career Academies

• The idea of the career academy has been around since the 1970s. It has undergone some changes, according to John H. Tyler and Magnus Lofstrom, writing in an article on the website, Future of Children, a collaboration of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. But it is still a viable program to reduce the dropout rate. The more than 1,500 career academies across the country are organized into three components: First, as a school-within-a-school, students remain with the same teacher their entire high school time; secondly, it integrates academic and vocational courses; lastly, it partners with local businesses to provide experience in the work world. A study involving more than 1,700 students found that the dropout rate was reduced by 11 percent among at-risk youth, and by the time students reached 12th grade, 40 percent had enough credits to graduate, compared to 26 percent in a control group.