Jennings discusses ways to improve the Bloomfield HS graduation rate

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Bloomfield High School Principal Chris Jennings spoke to the Board of Education about the high school graduation rate at the Oct. 12 meeting, explaining the factors that determine the rate at BHS and how many students graduate within four years of their first day of school as freshmen.

“Students who move in from other schools automatically count in our records regardless of when they moved in,” Jennings said at the meeting. “So if they did three years at another district and they come to Bloomfield, and maybe they’re behind academically, we’re responsible for their four years.”

In the special education program, some students stay at BHS beyond four years, until they are 21 years old. Even though it was planned that way, staying longer than four years as a student at the high school counts against the overall graduation rate, according to Jennings.

“Even though after four years they have enough credits to graduate, they’re not graduating, they’re staying for additional services,” he said. “If it’s 12 or 15 students per year, they count against our graduation rate … even though we knew ahead of time they were going to stay.”

English-language-learner students also often take an extra year to graduate high school, depending on how much English they knew when they started at BHS. Jennings said those students are also factored into the graduation rate.

Even so, he said at the meeting, the graduation rate at the high school for the 2020-2021 school year was 93.1 percent, up from 92.9 percent in 2019-2020. The rate has risen every year since 2016 with the exception of the 2018-2019 school year, when it dipped to 89.7 percent from 90 percent the year before.

“Our five-year tree for the four-year graduation rate continues to be very strong,” Jennings said. “It continues to be extremely competitive with all of our neighboring towns, and it’s something that, despite all those factors, we’re at 93.1 percent, our highest of the last five years.”

According to Jennings, the key to the steady graduation rate at the high school has been transitioning students into their freshman year at BHS. Around 2010, the district changed its ninth-grade transition program.

“What we realized is, if we don’t transition students into the high school appropriately with as much support as we can give them as a ninth-grader, it’s those ninth-graders that struggle,” he said. “That’s what we can control. All those other factors I spoke about, ELL students, people moving in from out of state, people moving in from other districts — those are out of our control.”

The traditional approaches to transitioning graduating eighth-graders to high school are still done at BHS: open houses, high school students spending time with middle schoolers at Bloomfield Middle School and freshman orientation. But the school also created the RAFT program, which targets the lower 15 percent of students who might otherwise fail multiple classes and put their graduation at risk; the program is still open to all freshmen.

“Every ninth-grader, if they’ve missed a deadline, if they need to retake a test or a quiz, they have an opportunity to do that and have that new grade counted into their average,” Jennings said. “It goes to understand what students are going through, why they may need an extended deadline, why they may need to retake a test or quiz.”

The goal of the program is that 95 percent of freshmen earn 30 or more high school credits. The 30-credit threshold is what makes a student a sophomore. Scheduling for freshmen takes priority, and teachers who teach ninth-graders meet at least twice a week to talk about the students they share.

“If a parent needs to come in to see a teacher, they have access to all of their core teachers at one time,” Jennings said. “That’s extremely helpful.”

Also in the freshman grading policy is an effort to stay away from zeroes being averaged into a final grade.

“Zeroes are a death knell to any student,” Jennings said. “One of the things we emphasize is not using grades to teach responsibility. Students don’t necessarily learn lessons because of the grade they got in the middle of a marking period. They don’t realize the real impact that’s going to have three, four, six weeks from now, and all of a sudden, those zeroes have added up and it’s too much, and they give up. Our job is to make sure they continue to build bridges and let them hold on to that raft towards passing grades.”

  Bloomfield Board of Education, Bloomfield High School, FEATURED