Jersey City Boasts Lowest Dropout Rate on Record
In a perfect world, our drop-out rate would be 0% - but I want to celebrate this achievement.
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Jersey City schools are on track to have their best year on record in terms of their high school dropout rate this year.
In both September and October, the school system posted its lowest high school dropout figures since at least the 2012-13 school year, the earliest year data is available from.
Just three students dropped out of school in both months. The highest September dropout total, by comparison, was 67 students in the 2013-14 school year. For October, the record is 29, set in 2012-13 and 2014-15.
The success is partially a result of “finally [being] able to dole out resources we haven’t had in a decade,” said Jersey City Board of Education President Mussab Ali, referring to the board’s decision to fully fund the school system in their 2021 budget earlier this year.
Ali added that the dropout figures point to the general resurgence of Jersey City schools, as it becomes a district where spots in pre-K are distributed via lottery because of high demand and where parents who in the past might have moved or sent their children to private school choose to stay in the public system.
According to the New Jersey Department of Education’s 2019-20 School Performance Report for Jersey City, JCPS’s dropout rate has still been above the state average in recent years, even as it’s declined slightly. The rate fell from 2.3% in the 2017-18 school year to 1.8% in the 2019-20 school year, but it was higher than the state average in both years of 1.2% and 1.0%, respectively.
Additionally, although the graduation rate has held steady over the last three years, coming in at 77.3% in 2020, it’s below the state four-year graduation rate of 91%. Due to federal and state-level waivers of different data reporting requirements owing to the COVID pandemic, the School Performance Report doesn’t say if Jersey City met its annual graduation rate target for the class of 2019 and 2020.
There are also inequalities in which students are more likely to dropout of high school. The four-year graduation rate for white students in the class of 2019 was 84.3%; for Hispanic students, that rate was 73.6% and for Black students, 67.9%.