Giving Students Hope: A District Model for Systemwide Supports Improves Attendance and Graduation Rates

“When students have hope that that they can pass the course, they come to school. It’s when they lose hope, get so far behind, and believe they’re going to fail that they stop coming to school or become even more disengaged.” 

This sentiment, shared by Dr. Sheila Quinn, superintendent at Clover School District (CSD) in Clover, South Carolina, encapsulates the “why” behind her district’s commitment to systemwide supports for middle and high school students. We recently had the opportunity both to share new research findings that meet ESSA Tier 2 evidence requirements coming out of the district and to have a conversation with Dr. Quinn on the implementation strategies used. 

In the third-party validated study, our researchers found that students who successfully completed at least one course using Courseware had, on average, 23 percent fewer absences and 33 percent fewer tardies than their peers. The findings indicate that the implementation of Courseware, which combines flexible scheduling and thoughtful program design, offers educators an impactful strategy to improve student engagement and attendance. 

To provide valuable insights into CSD’s implementation of Courseware in relation to response to intervention (RTI), let’s unpack the program design as outlined in Dr. Quinn’s own words. 

Tier 1: Core Instruction Supplemented by a Flexible Implementation 

Dr. Quinn: When you have 2,750 students in a high school, you have scheduling conflicts all the time. So, we offer an iSchool lab where students can go into the lab and take any course through their Edmentum platform that they need to fit their schedule. We use the initial credit courses in grades 8 through 12 because we offer high school credit courses in grade 8.  We take advantage the full battery of courses from the Edmentum catalog. Students take courses to get ahead or courses they need to graduate. Sometimes, those courses are happening off campus; sometimes, they're happening on campus in our iSchool lab. This has worked as our tier 1 system, and it has been very, very successful. 

Tier 2: Focused Concept Recovery for High School Credits 

Dr. Quinn: Some students attempt a course in the traditional classroom, but they are not successful.  Our students who are 10 percentage points from passing the course at the end of it are allowed to go into the Edmentum courseware to reengage with the content. Teachers assign students the units they failed in the class the first time, and they're able to recover that credit. This opportunity is provided in semester one, semester two, and through the summer. It has been extremely helpful with those students who are just a little bit behind. 

Tier 3: Condensed-Credit Recovery Time 

Dr. Quinn: What [educators] noticed is that students who were significantly behind—maybe they were not attending school regularly or maybe they were accumulating a lot of zeros by the end of the first quarter—their grades were already so low that they were not going to make the tier 2 intervention for credit recovery. So, [educators at] the high school removed those students from the traditional setting because they were so far behind and put them into the Response to Intervention (RTI) lab. These students were placed into the proficiency-based platform Edmentum has [Courseware] to redo those parts of the units and things that they didn't do well on the first time. The teacher in the classroom didn’t have to try to go back and figure that out because we had Courseware to help us solve that. So, we were able to reengage students that way. 

To increase student success, we provided tutoring support from our interventionists in the lab with them. The RTI lab is equipped with a math and a reading interventionist and a coach facilitator who has the kind of accountability personality that helps kids stay on track. We also have teachers from the other core content areas, science and social studies, who come in during their planning period. So, if [students] got to a place where they were stuck, they had that face-to-face help as well. 

Foundational Skill Repair for High School Students 

Dr. Quinn: This year, we've really refined [foundational skill repair] even more because we've got Exact Path going as well. We have diagnostic data so that we can anticipate if a student is going to struggle with the next unit because, based on what we see in Exact Path, they don’t have the prerequisite skills. So, we're using Exact Path to do some tutoring with kids before they meet a particular unit that they're going to struggle with, and that has added another layer of support we're able to do in that RTI lab.

Bridging Transitions for Rising 9th Graders 

Dr. Quinn: This school year, we also took a closer look at how to address our 8th grade students who failed all four core subjects and matriculated to 9th grade by attending summer school to pass.  We anticipated that they were going to struggle in 9th grade with several skill deficits. So, we started a group of students in the RTI lab with the interventionists and teacher one-to-one support. There are only six or seven 9th graders in this category in that lab at our 9th grade campus. Every single day, the student support team meets to examine the results these students are producing in Courseware. If they are not successful, tutoring is provided immediately.  If they're absent that day, the principal or assistant principal calls home to encourage them to come back tomorrow and let them know we'll be there waiting for them. This format is providing students with individualized attention, which helps us meet our personalized learning goal. 

Beyond the Tiers: Flexible and Alternative Virtual Options 

Dr. Quinn: The last bucket is our virtual school, Clover Virtual Academy, and Blue Eagle Academy Alternative School. Those programs use EdOptions Academy.  EdOptions is working fairly well at Clover Virtual Academy because these are students who are choosing to be purely online and they're more equipped virtual learners. In the alternative school, we've had to balance some EdOptions [Academy] and some Edmentum platform [Courseware] where our teachers are the teacher of record. We've developed an MTSS [multi-tiered system of supports] model to support students in those programs. When we moved to the EdOptions platform, we cut a million dollars from our budget because we were able to utilize the resources there in a different way. That has been a huge benefit. 

Academic Outcomes and Graduation Success Adds Up 

Dr. Quinn: We’ve been able to track our data over the course of the last two to three years, and it has been amazing to see the progress. Before, when we didn’t have this system in place as tightly, we did OK. We had 88 percent of our 9th graders who were matriculating out of 9th grade with six credits. Still, that is 12 percent of your kids who are going to be 9th grade repeaters. Since implementing this model last year, we had 96 percent of our 9th grade students finish the year on track. If you can get them out of the 9th grade, you can almost always get them to graduation. 

Again, before we had this system in place, we had a good graduation rate of 92 percent, but we couldn’t crack the performance level of other elite high schools in our state. Since we’ve implemented this system last year, our graduation rate hit the highest of any traditional high school in South Carolina. We achieved a 96.6 percent graduation rate. 

When you develop a system and your people buy into it, and they can implement it with fidelity, you start to see consistent performance across the metrics you’re trying to move. We’re trying to be a results-driven district [with a] results-driven culture.  Therefore, we do track our data, and we set high goals.  Having a product that allows you to do these things consistently is certainly beneficial.