Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education

GeorgiaDepartment of Technical and Adult Education

General Overview

Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education, with oversight by the Governor’s Office of Workforce Development, is submitting the following documentation for the purpose of validating $410,000 in WIA Incentive Funding for Program Year 2004.  The project duration will be from July 1, 2006 – June 30, 2008.

The purpose of Stay in School (SiS) initiative is to provide support to a limited number of sites that have identified and conducted promising strategies in the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th grades that seem to have a positive result in preventing students from dropping out of school.  

The vision is to capitalize on the successful practices of existing initiatives and focus those practices on the assessment of students transitioning into high school for career awareness/readiness thus providing them with the tools, resources and knowledge needed to make a more informed career decision.  Current literature indicates that more informed career decision-making can result in improved educational achievement, improved preparation and participation in postsecondary education, better articulation among levels of education and between education and work, and higher graduation rates.

In FY 06, through the Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education, the Governor provided $1 million to begin the Stay in School (SiS) initiative.  Fifteen sites were selected to participate in a two-year SiS project and through the Georgia School to Work initiative another $512,000 was provided to fund an additional eight sites to participate for one year only.  From the beginning, it was the intention of this pilot that additional funding would be needed to bring it to a successful completion.

Early in 2006, Governor Perdue requested that $1 million from the WIA discretionary funds be targeted to expand the one-year SiS sites to two year projects ($500,000) and increase the number of SiS sites by adding an additional seven to improve underrepresented areas of the state ($500,000).   States have used these discretionary funds to support vital services and infrastructure and to launch innovative projects with statewide benefits.  Increasing the number of students that stay in and complete high school is a high priority for Georgia.

Each year, almost one third of all public high school students – and nearly one half of all blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans – fail to graduate from high school with their class. Many of these students abandon school with less than two years to complete their high school education. The decision to drop out is a dangerous one for the student. Dropouts are more likely than their peers who graduate, to be unemployed, living in poverty, receiving public assistance, in prison, on death row, unhealthy, divorced and single parents with children who repeat the high school drop out negative cycle. Our communities and nation also suffer from the dropout epidemic due to the loss of productive workers and the higher costs associated with increased incarceration, health care and social services.

The purpose of this proposal is to expand the remaining seven one-year SiS sites to two year projects ($350,000) and support the final year of evaluation ($60,000).

The SiS Initiative has promise for Georgia and could be replicated in other areas of the nation.  The main trust of the SiS initiative is to increase the focus on long term academic and career learning opportunities and provide for long term comprehensive service strategies for youth.  It includes a performance based accountability system that supports youth program standard performance measures as well as provides a cohort to document intermediate and long term success.  Georgia is confident of the success of the SiS initiative but expanding the eight one year sites to two year sites will increase the success for the students and maintain the 20,000 potential students impacted by this intervention.  Adding additional sites will provide for a more appropriate geographic distribution to document the results.  This SiS initiative embraces the ten essential elements of a WIA youth program and these elements are implemented in many of the successful practices. Most importantly, SiS functions within a collaborative environment utilizing multiple fund sources, and it meets the applied definition of appropriate utilization of discretionary funds. 

Project Duration as an Initiative: 2006 – 2008 School Year

Success Matrix:

One of the most exciting aspects of the SiS initiative is the evaluation component.  Although long term results will not be available for four years, the effort established a research agenda that will allow the state to determine intermediate results at the end of the first year as well as all subsequent years thereafter.  Each site agreed to collect information on the following performance indicators:           

• 80% of the eighth grade students report completing a career interest survey
• 80% of the leaving eighth grade students report completing an academic career plan for courses to take in high school and beyond           
• 85% of the middle school teachers report meeting with teachers from high school to which they send students to discuss expectations, content knowledge and performance standards for students entering high school
• 85% of the middle school teachers report being a part of a structured guidance program in the school    

In addition, the data will be collected from external sources that provide information on student attendance, disciplinary referral, ninth grade course success and ninth grade remediation.  Specifically, the following desired performance indicators will be addressed:

• Decrease the percentage of students who fail one or more courses in the ninth and tenth grade by 10%
• Decrease the percentage of students who need remediation in the ninth and tenth grade by 10%
• Decrease absenteeism of ninth and tenth grade students by 10%
• Decrease the number of ninth and tenth grade student disciplinary referrals by 10%

Early indicators show that nearly 20,000 students will be impacted by this effort in the first year.  Within its collaborative framework, we anticipate that the SiS initiative will result in positive annual progress moving students from one educational level to the next.