LEWISTON — Efforts to help more high schoolers graduate are working, even if year-to-year statistics have dipped, local school leaders said.

On Monday, the state Department of Education announced that the four-year graduation rate for Maine schools rose for the third year in a row to an average of 85.34 percent.

Locally, Lewiston High, Buckfield Junior-Senior High, Lisbon High and Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in Paris all saw gains. The highest was at Lisbon High School, which jumped almost 18 points, from a 2011 rate of 72.99 percent to 90.52 percent in 2012.

Most area high schools saw declines.

Leavitt Area High School in Turner fell 6.23 percent, Telstar Regional High School in Bethel decreased 2.84 percent and Mt. Blue High School in Farmington dropped 0.78 percent. Other decliners included Mountain Valley High School in Rumford, Dirigo High in Dixfield, Poland Regional High School and Edward Little High School in Auburn.

Auburn fell 2.5 percent to an overall rate of 77.94 percent.

“When I look at the data, I look at a longer trend than just the two years,” said Shelly Mogul, Auburn School Department’s director of curriculum. “Of course, we would have loved to have maintained 80.4 percent or gone up.”

Afterschool and alternative education programs have been busy, Mogul said. In 2010, EL’s graduation rate was 67.58 percent.

“We’ve always targeted seniors, but in the last couple of years, we’ve also targeted freshmen, to make sure they don’t leave their first year in high school behind in credits,” she said. “We won’t see the effect of that until they get to their senior year. We know that we might have to wait a while to get the payback.”

At Poland Regional High School, the message was the same.

Interim Superintendent Michael Wilhelm said Monday that he was confident the drop was a one-year anomaly. In 2011, Poland’s rate was 90 percent. Last year, it was 81.3 percent.

“We’ve seen the trend go up,” Wilhelm said. “(But) every group of kids is different.”

Meanwhile, Lewiston Superintendent Bill Webster said he was proud of Lewiston’s gain from 66.15 percent in 2011 to 71.06 percent in 2012.

“I’m very pleased,” Webster said. “There’s a lot of work that’s gone to make that improvement. That being said, it’s still a long ways from where we want to be.”

The Lewiston graduation rate remains the third lowest in Maine. Only high schools in Wiscasset and Fort Fairfield ranked lower.

“It’s almost a community-wide effort to improve the aspirations of our students,” Webster said.

The School Department has increased enrollment in the Franklin Alternative School in Auburn, created an alternative program in the middle school and established a special school for expelled students. Its aim is to reintegrate students into the classroom.

Lisbon also cited new alternative programs in its jump in graduations.

The Lisbon School Department created the Gartley Street School during the 2010-11 school year. The alternative program has smaller classes and a flexible schedule for at-risk kids.

“We’re now really seeing an improvement for our students,” said Heather Wilmot, Lisbon’s director of student services.

Statewide, the graduation rate has risen more than 1.5 percent since the previous year and nearly 5 percentage points since 2009.

“This is great news for Maine education, and a testament to a lot of hard work by a lot of educators,” state Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen said in a written statement. “What we need to do now is really dig down into the data, which schools are making gains, and what are they doing? Then, let’s do more of what works.”

For the full list, see the Maine Department of Education website at http://www.maine.gov/education/gradrates/gradrates.html.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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