Data sessions, after-school tutoring and working with students one-on-one, are among steps the Meridian School District is planning to increase it’s graduation rate to 80 percent.

The Meridian Public School District Board of Trustees discussed the district’s restructured dropout prevention plan during a meeting Monday. The plan was approved by the school board and has to be submitted to the Mississippi Department of Education.

Deidre Bland, dropout prevention coordinator, presented several steps in how the district will address the district’s graduation rate. Bland said as part of the statewide measure, schools that don’t have an 80 percent graduation rate will have to create a restructured dropout prevention plan.

Meridian’s graduation rate 76.2 percent for the 2018-2019 school year, according to the Meridian Department of Education.

Some problems the district has seen are students not meeting the requirements to graduate, such as failing the four required state tests, chronic absenteeism and behavior, Bland said.

From the class of 2020, 206 have met all four state-required tests, 33 have met three, 29 have met two required tests, 22 have met two, 27 have met one required test and 13 have not to meet any of the tests, Bland said.

Meridian High School has put several things in place to make sure students are meeting the testing requirement by making an ACT score of 17 in place of those tests, an after school program, ACT prep, remediation and retesting students.

Another step in the plan is having a team that includes the district’s superintendent secondary principals, school counselors, dropout prevention coordinator, and some CTE teachers, Bland said. The team will meet once a month to review data and recognize areas of improvement in the district.

The plan will focus on three areas: attendance, behavior and curriculum/course work, Bland said. If a student is not doing well in one of those areas they will have a hard time graduating from school, she said.

“We try to provide students with the supports that will help to increase the attendance and the things that they need to be successful in class,” Bland said.

She also talked about some action steps that will help students that are in danger of failing. Some of those steps are counseling students, providing ACT testing strategies, enhance afterschool programs, increase dual enrollment and CTE programs, career cruising and offerering professional development for teachers.

The district will create indiviaulized students’ plans based on a student’s needs and will start working with students as early as seventh grade. Bland said this will allow her and school counselors to help students helps students with a career path before coming to high school.

Bland also described an action plan for the schools that include evaluating D and F reports, improving teacher and parent communication, evaluating attendance reports, speaking with students who might be failing and having strategies for positive behavior.

The goal of the plan is to make sure the district is graduating students that are college and career ready, Bland said.

Amy Carter, superintendent of the district, said Bland’s plan shows the collaboration effort from the district as a way to improve the graduation rate. Carter said the district’s graduation rate was going up but there was a small dip.

“We have put things in place to ensure that it will increase for the upcoming year,” Carter said.

The restructured drop prevention plan is the step in the right direction for the district by helping students before they get to high school, Carter said.

“If we can focus on kids from the seventh grade on up to 12th grade, we can get more students graduating,” she said.