Liberty County high school students are graduating at a better rate than before the COVID-19 pandemic but the rates also slipped from the previous year.
The four-year rate for 2023 — based on students who began ninth grade with Liberty County schools four years ago — was 88.8%. The five-year rate was 90.3% and the overall rate was 89.5%.
“When you start at looking at graduation rates in the high 80s and 90s, that is incredibly impressive when you start looking at schools across the state,” said Dr. John Ryan executive director of technology and media for Liberty County Schools.
Graduation rates in 2019 were 87.99% for the four-year rate, 88.79% for the five-year rate and the overall rate was 88.3%.
Liberty schools’ graduation rates for 2022 were 90.02% for the four-year rate, 93.06% for the five year-rate and 91% for the overall rate.
“We have made up all the ground in the pandemic and then some,” Dr. Ryan said. “Do we have some more work to do? Certainly. We are making goals and making headway.”
No scores or data were released for 2020 and only limited data was released for 2021 graduation rates.
State targets, which have not been done since 2019, have not been set and they likely will be based upon the 2023 graduation rates.
Liberty County High School had a 1.3 point increase in their overall (CCRPI) graduation rate and a 3.2 point increase in their four-year graduation rate from 2022. Both high schools had an increase from pre-pandemic scores for the four-year graduation rate and overall graduation rate.
System and board members thanked the teachers, including those in the elementary and middle school levels, and the parents for helping students reach those graduation rate marks.
“They are the ones putting the work in and the time in and we can see that in our high graduation rates,” Ryan said.
One of the issues the system faces, Superintendent Dr. Franklin Perry said, is the number of transient students.
“And other counties in our RESA (regional educational service agency) don’t have that,” he said. “If we had students who stayed with us all four years, it’s much easier to keep up with them. Now when they leave, we have to find out where these students went.”
“We have students who transfer into us, stay for a week, and drop out,” Ryan acknowledged.
Those students still count against the school system, Perry pointed out, and the system has to track them down.
“If we look at the number of students over the years that we don’t know where they went, that has gone down dramatically,” Ryan said. “Right now, we only have 15 students we don’t know where they went. At one point, we were tracking over 100 alone at Bradwell where we did not know where they went to.”
To bolster the graduation rates, the system is putting in a new procedure for documentation checks and members of the senior class meet three times a year with Dr. Perry and Assistant Superintendent Dr. Zheadric Barbra. Those meetings typically happen in August, January and April.