LEWISTON — The Lewiston School Department and other community groups will work with national experts to boost the number of students who stay in school and graduate.

The goal is to stem the flow of 100 to 110 students who drop out of Lewiston High School every year, which gives the city a dropout rate of 8.37 percent, according to Maine Department of Education statistics.

The Lewiston School Committee voted Monday night to partner with the National Dropout Prevention Center, Olympic Behavior Labs, IBM and Microsoft. With the center and the corporate giants, Lewiston will apply for three years of annual grants of $250,000 to $350,000 to develop a “dropout early warning system.”

That early warning system would be a systemic approach for dropout prevention, identifying students most at risk, then identifying what that individual student needs for intervention, even as early as kindergarten.

“It’s a community approach to dropout prevention rather than a school approach,” said Rosemary Kooy, director of the Safe Schools Healthy Students Initiative project.

National experts would look at Lewiston’s existing social and school programs, and give direction about whether those programs are working, Kooy said.

Existing programs would be compared to 15 proven strategies to prevent dropouts.

“Usually when someone comes in and does a systems review, they discover there are enough resources, but they need to be realigned and targeted, using resources more efficiently,” Kooy said.

The hope is that eventually the right intervention would result in increased school attendance by more students, improved test scores, improved behavior and more students graduating on time.

That would be done by identifying students in high risk situations “at much earlier ages, much earlier than we identify them now, so we could apply these targeted interventions.” By the time students reach middle or high school, they’re not at risk for dropping out. “They’re in much better shape,” Kooy said.

Lewiston School Superintendent Leon Levesque said the national dropout prevention center will look at Lewiston’s risk factors “unique for our community.”

What the center’s been good at “is identifying practices across the country that have been successful,” Levesque said.
National dropout prevention experts would then work with the community to enhance existing programs.

Signs that a student in the early grades is at risk for becoming a dropout include low achievement, staying back once or more, poor attendance and low commitment to school.

Ways to combat those problems include developing personal plans for each student, engaging the student’s family, programs to help students’ social skills and classroom behavior, early literacy, mentoring and tutoring.

School Committee members were delighted with the idea of improving the number of students who graduate, but several were concerned about the costs. If a grant is not achieved, local taxpayers cannot afford it, several committee members agreed. “You can’t get blood from stone, and our stone is dry,” John Butler said.

Public sources are scarce, Kooy agreed, but there is money from private foundations. “When people say there’s no money, my response is there’s tons of money. You need to know where to look for it and how to get it,” Kooy said. “We’ll just keep submitting until we get it.”

Kooy contacted the National Dropout Prevention Center earlier this year, and it agreed to partner with Lewiston. Lewiston is the only Maine school district that has a partnership with the center, Kooy said.

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