By Marley Seaman
"We generally report a 96 percent graduation rate," said Michael Roccoforte, the district's assistant superintendent for curriculum. "[Baldwin is] always in the 96-point-something range."
The district calculates its graduation rate the way most people might expect. The rate is a percentage of the senior class, with the number of students who graduate at the end of the school year divided by the number who had been expected to graduate at the start of the year. The district includes June and August grads. This gives it the highest possible percentage.
New York state, however, has its own set of standards. "We look at [the results] at the end; they look at it from the beginning," Roccoforte said.
The state does not start with the senior class when calculating its percentages. Instead, it looks at a larger group of students called the "cohort" - the total number of students who entered the high school four years earlier, plus some who move to the district during those years. The 2005 graduates are the 2001 cohort, as they started high school in September 2001.
Students who move into the district as juniors and seniors, and spend two years or less in Baldwin schools, aren't counted as part of the cohort. According to the state, this gave Baldwin an 89 percent graduation rate in 2003.
The statistical picture became even murkier on July 14, when the state released a new set of data, compiled in January, for the Board of Regents to use as it considered policy changes. The newest numbers appear to show that Baldwin, and many other Long Island schools, graduate a smaller portion of the cohort than previously thought. Baldwin's cohort graduation rate is pegged at 79.4 percent, and other schools face an even steeper drop.
Because these figures were prepared in January 2005, they do not exclude juniors and seniors who moved to Baldwin, making the cohort bigger, and they do not include students who graduated in August 2004, making the number of graduates smaller. (Baldwin has an estimated 270 students in its summer-school program.)
The New York State Education Department says that figures recently released to the public were only intended to inform the Board of Regents, and should not be compared with past years. Roccoforte said it would be unfair to make such a comparison, as it would suggest that all students who come into the district are adequately prepared.
"[M]ost of the kids entering this district are coming from New York City schools," he explained. "They're [also] coming from areas like Freeport, Roosevelt, Wyandanch, Hempstead and other districts that we know are plagued with academic problems."
According to Roccoforte, many of these students do not come to the Baldwin School District adequately prepared, and that makes it difficult, or impossible, for them to graduate in four years. For example, he said, "A girl entered Baldwin this October from a different district. She is 17 years old and only had enough credits to qualify as a ninth-grader." In the January estimate, she counted as a student who failed to graduate on time, but under district standards, she would not be counted as such because she spent less than two years in Baldwin's schools.
The final figures for the Baldwin Senior High School class of 2005 - the 2001 cohort - will be made public in early 2006. The district expects Baldwin's performance to be similar to past years.
Comments about this story? MSeaman@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 207.
