By Matthew Sockol
Staff Writer
SAYREVILLE – Although a high percentage of students graduated from the Sayreville School District last year, the graduation rates are a source of concern for the Board of Education.
The topic was brought up by board Vice President Phyllis Batko during a meeting on May 2. According to Batko, 90.7 percent of the district’s students graduated from Sayreville War Memorial High School by the end of the 2015-16 school year, but the district’s statewide percentile was 37 percent – meaning that 63 percent of districts in the state had higher graduation rates.
By comparison, neighboring districts Edison and East Brunswick ranked higher for 2015-16 with statewide percentiles of 90 and 84 percent, respectively, while North Brunswick ranked lower at 26 percent, according to Batko. Edison, the highest ranked school cited by Batko, had a graduation rate of 97.7 percent.
At a May 16 meeting, Assistant Superintendent Marilyn Shediack informed the board that, according to the state, Sayreville’s statewide percentile is based on other schools having close, but slightly higher graduation rates.
“Since there are hundreds of schools – 600 plus – even being lower by a tenth of a percent can potentially bring down a district’s percentile quickly,” Shediack said.
According to Shediack, the amount of students expected to graduate within four years in 2015-16 was 443. Of those 443 students, 402 graduated.
The assistant superintendent provided information on the students expected to graduate that year, referred to as a cohort, and explained why 41 students did not graduate by the end of the school year.
“If a student transfers in to our school, they are ours,” Shediack said. “They count in our cohort, whether they transfer in [at] ninth grade or January of their senior year. They count for us.”
A total of 14 students in the 2015-16 cohort transferred out of the district and were unverified as to where they went, according to Shediack. Shediack explained that if students transferred to another district in the state or to nearby state, they could be removed from the cohort, but not if they transferred to a distant state.
“If a student transfers out of our school, they have to tell us where they are going,” the assistant superintendent said. “If a student goes to another high school in New Jersey and oftentimes in New York and even Pennsylvania, it’s not too difficult to track them and to get them off our rolls. But if they transfer out of state to someplace in Florida or something like that and it can’t be verified that they enrolled there, they’re still on us.”
Seven of the 14 students who transferred out said they were planning to attend adult school which, according to Shediack, only takes enrollment twice a year. As a result, students who leave the district in January cannot enroll in adult school until August or September. Shediack assumed that the students never enrolled in the adult school or did not graduate.
According to Shediack, five of the 14 students transferred out to complete a General Educational Development (GED) program. As the students chose to take the GED test instead of attending high school, they were counted as not having enrolled in another district.
Seven of the 41 students were defined as on-track continuing, which Shediack said were students maintaining enough credits to stay in their grade level, but did not graduate within four years. Five of the on-track continuing students, according to the assistant superintendent, are special education students continuing their education in Sayreville.
One of the on-track continuing students needed to pass a graduation test, which he did after the conclusion of the 2015-16 school year, and another transferred out and back into the district, but was missing necessary courses to graduate by 2015-16, according to Shediack.
Twelve of the 41 students were defined as off-track continuing, which the assistant superintendent said meant they were not progressing along the grade levels due to lacking necessary credits. According to Shediack, many of the students were English language learners who came to Sayreville for high school.
The remaining eight students dropped out of the high school, according to Shediack. The assistant superintendent said four of the students who dropped out were enrolled in the Sayreville district for less than a year and two were enrolled for less than two years.
Board President Kevin Ciak commented that the statewide percentile does not take certain factors into consideration.
“The danger with the percentile ranking is that it doesn’t take into account any type of economic factors. It doesn’t take into account English language learners. It doesn’t take into account the other diversity that you have within your school system when students come in,” Ciak said. “It just simply ranks schools from highest to lowest in terms of performance and we know there’s a correlation between family income and education outcome.
“As you look at Bergen County [and] the 70 districts that are up there, they’re automatically going to score much higher from a percentile basis than we would be able to compete with,” Ciak said.
The board president found that certain categories of students who did not graduate within four years required more attention.
“If they’re on-track and continuing, while not graduating on time is very significant and emotional to the student and certainly it affects our statistics, as long as you complete high school in five years instead of four, it’s not that big a deal,” Ciak said. “It affects our scores and obviously we want our students to [graduate] in four years, but it’s not that big a deal if they [graduate] in five.
“And the off-track continuing – if you’ve got a special education student [who] in many cases we’re obligated to educated until they’re 21, again, there’s not much you’re going to be able to do to speed that process up to get them out in the four years,” he said.
“When you look at the categories that to me are a big deal, it’s when they leave and they go nowhere, or they drop out. I think the question for the board is of the students who transfer out and are unverified and the dropouts, how much are we willing to invest to address that cohort, in terms of preventing them from getting to the dropout stage or preventing them from [saying they’re going to an adult school, but not enroll]? And that, in some cases, comes down to resources and money.”
Board member John Walsh emphasized that his fellow members did not want to be driven by the numbers given to them.
“A special ed student who might need a couple of extra years is entitled to go until he’s 21,” Walsh said. “He needs that; that gives a great education for him. I’d rather have that than go up a tenth of a point. We feel better about ourselves because we went up a tenth of a point, but we’re not helping the kid [who] just moved here. That’s the business we’re in: to educate children.
“Not every case is going to work out the best, but we’re not going to turn our backs on these kids,” Walsh said. “We’re not going to become a company that just worries about the bottom line – we’re going to move these kids through in four years for our graduation rate. We have some challenges here, but we’re facing them. The one thing [the district’s teachers] have in common is they love these kids. I have three boys here [and] I wouldn’t want anyone else teaching my kids.
“That’s important that we’re serving the kids, not worrying [that] we went up a tenth of a point so our percentile moved up 20. That’s not real progress.”
Contact Matthew Sockol and [email protected].