Local high school dropout rates were well below state and county averages, though Santa Maria High School’s numbers neared the state’s 24.2 percent figure, according to California Department of Education data released Wednesday.

Continuation high schools in the Santa Maria and Lompoc valleys fared even worse, with dropout rates topping 75 percent.

School districts will have until Aug. 28 to update and verify any information, and the CDE will release a final report in September.

The latest dropout rates for the Santa Maria Joint Union High, Lompoc Unified, Santa Ynez Valley Union High and Lucia Mar Unified schools were calculated under a new system that gives students a special number, a move to ensure more accurate reporting of data, state officials said..

However, because the state only recently issued those 10-digit numbers, the most current dropout data tracks students for one year and relies heavily on a projected, or, derived, four-year rate.

Seventh- and eighth-grade dropout rates were also calculated using the new system, but officials say the numbers for junior high dropouts are less than reliable because those students are largely under the responsibility and control of their parents, even more so than high school students.

For the most part, local districts welcomed the new reporting system, despite its initial glitches.

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“This is the first time, and the first time you do anything there are going to be bugs and kinks,” said Sue Whitefield, director of student services for the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District (SMJUHSD).

Without an organized tracking system, tracking students throughout their academic careers had largely depended on the record keeping of individual school districts.

Thus, students who died or transferred were often marked as dropouts, and, conversely, students were marked as transfers when, instead of enrolling in a different district, they dropped out of school altogether.

A 2002 law mandated every student receive a non-personally identifying number that would be used to track students’ test scores, transfer history and other essential information.

Due to the system’s newness, dropout rates won’t reflect a student’s four-year performance until 2011, so the state derived a projected four-year dropout rate for the 2006-2007 school year.

Based on those numbers, the statewide dropout rate was

24.2 percent, and the dropout rates for Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties were 21.6 percent and 14.9 percent, respectively.

In the SMJUHSD, the overall dropout rate was 19.3 percent, with Santa Maria High School having a rate of 24.7 percent.

Meanwhile, Righetti High’s dropout rate was 7 percent, and Pioneer Valley High’s was 16.3 percent.

“Santa Maria and Pioneer Valley have a much larger Hispanic and migrant population than Righetti does, and that certainly contributes to dropouts when you have students moving around so much,” Whitefield said.

Lompoc Unified School District had an overall dropout rate of 12.8 percent.

Cabrillo High School had a rate of 5 percent, while Lompoc High School had a 12.9 percent rate, just above the district average.

“Overall, we’re very pleased with the results,” said Jeff Bass, student service director for Lompoc schools. “Next year we’ll have a baseline (for comparison) ... We’ll look at doing better certainly next year.”

One Lompoc school that did not perform so well was Maple Continuation High School, which had a rate of 76.3 percent.

The school performed similarly to Santa Maria’s Delta Continuation High School, which had a dropout rate of 78.5 percent.

District and state officials said the dropout numbers often appear deceptively high for continuation high schools because they have more at-risk students and also have small enrollment, with some having 130 students or less.

Dropout rates for Lucia Mar and Santa Ynez’s continuation schools weren’t calculated because they are so small.

Nipomo and Arroyo Grande High schools in the Lucia Mar Unified School District had low dropout rates of 4 percent and 5.2 percent, respectively.

“I thought that was impressive, but of course you always want to be better, you always want to improve,” said Sharon Roemer, Lucia Mar’s assistant superintendent of instruction.

The derived rate for Santa Ynez Valley Union High School is 3 percent.

“While our data is far better than the state and county averages, we believe that we can improve,” SYVUHSD Superintendent Paul Turnbull wrote in an e-mail.

Local school districts have implemented several intervention programs in recent years, though none of the programs is necessarily specifically geared toward preventing dropouts.

The programs run the gamut from extra tutoring and higher counselor-to-student ratios, to summer school and independent study options for students who want to catch up on missed credits.

Lompoc will be opening up a new charter school in the 2008-2009 school year geared specifically toward “at-risk” kids.

“Our goal is zero percent,” Roemer said. “That’s what we’re all about.”

For information about a specific school, including junior highs, go to www.cde.ca.gov and click on the box across the top of the page labeled data and statistics.

Natalie Ragus can be reached at 347-4580 or nragus@santamariatimes.com. Staff writer Julian Ramos contributed to this report.

July 17, 2008