CARIBOU, Maine — Caribou High School students with jobs could earn an elective alongside their paychecks next year, should an idea presented by CHS’s Dropout Prevention Committee receive school board approval.
Caribou High School had a dropout rate of 2.3 percent last year, which is well below the state’s average according to CHS Guidance Councilor Mark Pinette.
“But we’re not happy with (that drop-out rate),” Pinette said. “Until it’s zero, we won’t be happy with it.”
Pinette addressed the RSU 39 School Board during an April 16 meeting to apprise them of the Dropout Prevention Committee’s findings — including a recommendation that one elective credit be granted for 200 hours of paid work experience.
As proposed, working students would have to complete a workplace learning credit form to provide detailed information about how their job responsibilities relate to their lessons from school — like technology, reading and communication — and provide pay-stubs to verify 200 hours of paid work to receive their elective credit.
“It would be a good chance for them to tie their job into school, and the skills that they learn both ways,” Pinette explained. “We try to teach them good communication skills, for example, and we hope that those skills would be used in the workplace.”
Receiving an elective credit for work experience would not be a mandatory requirement for graduation, unlike community service hours, but Pinette explained that it could help some students meet the mandatory 3.5 elective credits requirement for graduation.
“Most CHS students graduate with 22 to 25 credits,” Pinette said. “(Receiving elective credit for work experience) is something certain kids would find very helpful; for other kids, it would just be icing on the cake.”
Providing an elective credit for work experience also highlights the importance of lessons learned on the job.
“It says ‘we think the skills you’re learning at work are important,’ and that’s something we want to have if we can,” Pinette added.
The proposed elective credit was one of three main targets the Dropout Prevention Committee was working on; as Pinette explained, the committee reiterated the importance of communication between grade levels, and discussed with the school board the possibility of allowing a student, in a very rare set of circumstances, a chance to re-take a failed course while simultaneously advancing to the next grade level.
Pinette quickly explained that the committee’s anticipated recommendation for students who fail a course would still be for the youth to repeat the class during summer school or through Adult Ed.
But in a rare case, where perhaps a student wasn’t able to attend summer school for a legitimate reason, Pinette said the Dropout Prevention Committee would like the chance to allow a junior student who failed an English class, for example, to become a senior and take two English classes.
“That isn’t something we’d normally recommend,” Pinette reemphasized, “but in some rare cases, we want to be able to do that.”
To date, policy prohibits the committee from offering a student the chance to remediate a course in such fashion.
While students, who choose to do so, drop out in their high school years, the committee identified that the process begins much earlier than that.
Pinette offered many different reasons why students leave school: attendance, poor academic performance, discipline referrals, retention, poor family-support, some mental health issues, substance abuse, harassment, poverty, socio-economics and low-resiliency due to developmental assets.
“Dropping out doesn’t usually happen overnight, but there’s probably a confluence of many risk factors coming into play at once — or by a critical incident,” Pinette described. “I’ve had students with all of these, and any one can be detrimental.”
The Dropout Committee aims to assist students by making support services available and ensuring no youth falls through the cracks, and they identified that ninth grade is a critical year for setting the tone for the rest of a student’s high school career.
Implementations of the suggestions proposed by the committee are still in the works administratively.
The next meeting of the RSU 39 is slated for Wednesday, May 7 at 7 p.m. in the superintendents’ office building.
