PHOENIX — It’s a trend going in the wrong direction: more and more high school students are dropping out of school. However, the Phoenix Union High School District is working to tackle this issue head-on.
For almost every day of the past few months, Helen Hoffman has called former PXU students to see if they would return to school. Hoffman is a counselor and part of the district's new Engagement Center.
More students are dropping out of the school district, growing from 4% in 2019 to 6% in 2023, according to data from the Arizona Department of Education.
“We've lost a lot of students, and I don't believe we have been doing a lot to see what we can do to get those students back. That's why this Engagement Center came about,” Hoffman said.
The Arizona Department of Education says the state’s dropout rate was at 6.11% in 2023. This is up from 5.38% in 2022. According to some national reports, Arizona ranks at about or slightly worse than the national average for dropout rates.
Hoffman said when she eventually speaks to the students who did drop out, they say they left for various reasons. Some students say they’re working on getting their GEDs. Some others ended up going to another school, like private schools, without the district’s knowledge.
In most cases, Hoffman says life gets in the way for students, and it got worse after COVID. She said some students had to leave school to work full-time and help their families. Others had children or moved away.
Hoffman said most of the time, the students who left the district were only a few credits away from graduation.
“A lot of times, kids just don’t know. ‘Oh, I dropped out. I’m gone,’” she explained. “They don’t realize, ‘Oh, I could potentially go back and graduate.’”
The Engagement Center is growing, planning to open its own space at Central High School and adding more staff to get even more students back in classrooms and work toward their future.
“Everybody deserves a second chance, and that’s why that’s so important to me. That’s why we reach out to these kids and give them that second chance,” Hoffman said.
