KU former front of the school

The numbers are out. The Oregon Department of Education released its graduation rates and Klamath Falls City Schools saw an improvement for the fourth consecutive year

KFCS went from a 73.25% graduation rate in 2020 to 73.63% this past June. The state of Oregon, as whole, went down by two percentage points to 80.63.

In KFCS four-year cohort graduation rate, the district saw its lowest percentage in the last five years in 2018, a low of 63.31%. Since then, the city district has seen an immense increase year after year, and after the class of 2021, has improved over 10 percentage points since 2018.

“I am very happy of the students here who are increasing their graduation rate. It is exciting we are continuing to improve, especially during COVID-19. For us to actually improve during that time says a lot about our students, staff and their families,” Brown said. “We are going to improve our professional learning communities, something we recently audited. We did an MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) and will take the results of that and provide strategies for improvement. We are going to focus more on student achievement.”

Klamath Union High School slightly fell from a graduation rate from being at 93.98% in 2020 to 91.43 in 2021. KU’s four-year graduation rate in 2020 was the highest it has been at the last five years.

Daymond Monteith, KFCS Director of School Improvement, is also pleased with this year’s graduation rates but expressed he wants the district to be near where the state of Oregon sits at.

“I would love for our graduation rate to be at the same level as the state. We are 10 percent below the state, which we need to get better at but the state went down two percent and we went up .04 percent,” Monteith said. “So, while I am not really excited we went up .04 percent, the rest of the state, on average was going down. We were not going up too much but still going up, which is a positive.”

Monteith gives credit to the city district’s Ninth Grade on Track program, a program that gives teachers and administrators the ability to see if a student is on pace to graduate by the end of their freshman year. At the moment, the program is only applied at Klamath Union.

In order to graduate on time, a student needs to near at least six credits by the end of their freshman year. If they do not have six credits, the probability they will graduate on time is 20%.  

Ninth Grade on Track is in its third year as a program at Klamath Union. Monteith will see how the program has impacted Klamath Union students after the class of 2022 graduates.

Monteith is looking at every angle when it comes to graduation and has noticed the difference of graduation between males and females.

“A group that really worries me that no one is talking about is boys. As a district, our boys graduation rate is almost 10 percentage point lower than girls. Why is that. We do not know the answer. But year after year, our boys are failing at a much higher rate,” Monteith said. “We look at other subgroups, too. We look at students with disabilities, students who were, at some point, English language learners, and other factors. Are they performing at the same rate as the whole group. Are they trending at the same trajectory.”