Excellent point, Barb. Would it be feasible to send questionnaires to families that have recently left the school system to ask what motivated them?
Peter Speert
Sent from my iPad
Without exit interviews, we don't know why that is taking place. And if a child is removed from the Lincoln School for whatever reason, it is very easy for the rest of the children in the family to follow even if they lack the precipitating issue. Different
vacation schedules can be a very strong reason for the family's convenience. How do we not lose the first child? No one should object to gathering more information so school actions are not taken or avoided due to ignorance.
I've been in Lincoln for over 30 years now and parents have been moving kids out of Lincoln schools ever since I can remember. They do it for a variety of reasons and academic excellence is often
not the main reason. At different times I remember parents being concerned about discipline in the schools, lack of structure, lack of desired extracurricular activities, etc. Very often, many parents want their kids to go to schools similar to
the ones they went to, whether that means private schools, parochial schools, more structured, ..., whatever.
I'd caution against taking this data as a sign that Lincoln schools aren't performing well enough.
-Bob
Hello,
Since the topic of trends has come up, I pulled together attrition data for previous years, straight from the DOE website:
|
School |
2016-2017 |
2017-2018 |
2018-2019 |
2019-2020 |
2020-2021 |
2021-2022 |
2022-2023 |
|
Lincoln |
6.2 |
6.8 |
7.1 |
6.8 |
7.8 |
5.0 |
8.5 |
|
Carlisle |
2.7 |
3.7 |
4.0 |
2.9 |
4.3 |
2.3 |
3.5 |
|
Dover/Sherborn |
2.7 |
3.0 |
3.1 |
3.1 |
4.8 |
4.1 |
3.0 |
|
Lexington |
3.7 |
3.0 |
4.0 |
2.5 |
6.2 |
5.9 |
4.2 |
Going back as far as 2016, Lincoln School consistently has the highest attrition in this group (with only one single exception in 2021 where Lexington was higher, but we were still higher than Carlisle and Dover/Sherborn). Getting this data is a very manual
process, which is why I focused on our similar districts plus Lexington that was used as a comparison, but I am happy to add other towns if people are interested.
It's not a difference of 1 - 2 students. Carlisle has a similar size to ours (383 in grades 2-7 versus our 356). If we had had their attrition coming into 2022-2023, we would have lost 18 fewer children. I am not making an assumption as to why our attrition
is higher, but I do think it is worth investigating.
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