Florida’s Bay County Schools See Higher Graduation Rate Than Statewide

PANAMA CITY — For 16-year-old Makayla Thomas, staff at Rosenwald High School helped her because they care.

“It’s like people separated. I mean, sometimes I get annoyed with some people, but later, like my teacher said, ‘I see, they care,'” Thomas said.

Bay District Schools officials reported a 20% increase in graduation rates over the past seven years, despite the obstacles of Hurricane Michael and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Big problem: Bay County has a homeless student problem. It’s bigger than you think.

FromSuperintendent Bill Husfelt :Technical education is in Bay County, but filling instructor positions remains a challenge

Rising from 88.5% to 90.2%, the district’s rate is higher than the state’s average rate for the first time. Graduation options specialist Jennifer Jennings said that growth began in 2016 after Superintendent Bill Husfelt launched an initiative called “Graduation Pathways” upon seeing the district had a 70% graduation rate. .

“When (Husfelt) started the initiative, a lot of things started happening. We started offering credit recovery. We started looking at our alternative options,” Jennings said. “And when I talk about alternative options, I’m talking about students in crisis who needed help getting their credits back. So we started thinking, ‘How do we support students while they’re in school? school, so that they graduate on time’, and every year we added something.”

Since then, BDS has monitored the data and focused on what each subgroup of students needed to be successful, Jennings said. Schools such as Bay High, JR Arnold, and Deane Bozeman High School have all seen more than a 10% increase in graduation rates over the past five years.

One of the local high schools that has seen a dramatic increase in graduation rates is Rosenwald High School in Panama City, which has seen a 29% to 54% increase since 2018. Rosenwald High is an alternative school designed to that students recover credits while providing resources to help them succeed.

Rosenwald High Principal Jonathan McQuagge said a major contributing factor to the rate increase was the implementation of Edgenuity, an online credit recovery program. He said after the hurricane they merged campuses with CC Washington, which used the program.

Once they fully embraced the program during the pandemic, it made all the difference, he said.

“If they’re struggling, students who need more time in math, they have that time, but they could really thrive in the story,” McQuagge said. “So they could be done with all of their history and science credits and just working on their math credits. So they were able to kind of work at an accelerated pace all the way through, from six to 12 now. .”

Firefighter training:Panama City State College offers firefighter training as new jobs become available

In addition to Edgenuity, Rosenwald offers several other programs and resources for students to help them while they earn the credits they need. From daycare to the ELL program that supports students from other countries, McQuagge said Rosenwald “really educates the whole child.”

“What I mean by that is there’s nothing they can give us that we can’t predict,” McQuagge said. “We have a care manager she dates, she gets donations for clothes, food, formula, baby diapers. Anything you can think of, she’s out there in the community. She’s there right now.”

Thomas said she has fond memories of attending Rosenwald so far, being at barbecues or working the front desk. She said that at Rosenwald she learned not to get frustrated easily and to talk about situations.

“I just had to talk and most people who have problems, that’s the only problem, they don’t talk,” Thomas said. “That’s all you have to do. Besides, some things won’t get out of hand if you talk about them, like they can solve them.”

Jennings said Rosenwald is special in that it provides anyone with the opportunity to complete their education if they need to recover credits.

“It’s a satellite of all of our high schools. Any student who meets the criteria to come to Rosenwald has the opportunity,” Jennings said. “And that means if it’s a student who’s two or more years behind, a student who’s going to age after high school, it doesn’t matter if you’re at Mosley or Arnold, at Rutherford, you have the opportunity to come here and earn the credits you need to graduate on time.”

Local Technical College:Tom P. Haney Center in Panama City Gains Technical College Status

As graduation rates have increased, Jennings and McQuagge said they’ve seen positive feedback from students, faculty and caregivers about the work they do.

“I think the parents are very grateful to have this opportunity to catch up,” McQuagge said. “And we hear a lot of success stories from parents and they come up and say, ‘You really helped our kid get there. It’s a good feeling.”

While the increase is something they both celebrate, Jennings and McQuagge both have goals to further increase graduation rates. Jennings said the district is working hard to find solutions to help the remaining 10% in the near future.

McQuagge said 100% might be a bit harder for Rosenwald in particular, he said he would like to see them bump up to around 75% for their students. He said he was proud of all the students.

“To think that we could go from 29% three years ago to 75% in the next three years,” McQuagge said. “That would be my goal, like a steady increase and I think that’s realistic. I’m doing that, I think we’ve created such a positive culture here and the kids really want to be here.”

Planning ahead, Thomas said she had a few options for completing her studies at Rosenwald.

“I want to be a mechanic, but I wanted to do what’s called a virtual college where you travel like it’s to another college,” Thomas said. “So it’s like two colleges and you’re traveling and doing credits online.”