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• Elona Hartjes, Ontario Certified Teacher

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At our school, we spend a lot of time and energy trying to keep at-risk kids in school so they’ll graduate. As I always tell students, a high school diploma doesn’t guarantee a good job, but if you don’t have a diploma you could be closing doors of opportunity. I hadn’t really thought about how much money we’d lose, if students didn’t graduate. That was, until I read this

Each Texas high school dropout costs the state $3,168 a year in lost revenue and higher spending on Medicaid and prisons, according to a study … partly conducted by the Indianapolis-based Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.

 

$3,168 a year in lost revenue and higher spending on health care and prisons! That’s for one year, year after year. I remember reading that about 30% of students drop out of school before they graduate. So if I extrapolate from those statistics, it could mean that at my school about 90 grade nine students might not graduate and that could cost us $285 120 a year , just in lost revenue. (That’s $US, not $CAN) That’s a lot of money, and that’s just at my school. There are over 30 high schools in my district so that means we could be losing $8 553 600 a year. Ooh, my goodness!

Maybe I should show that figure, $8 553 600, to the people who are always saying we should kick those kids out of school if they don’t want to toe the line? Maybe that’s why our provincial government is putting money back into education to fund new programs geared to the at-risk kids who feel there’s nothing for them at school. Maybe, just maybe.

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  These are my personal views and not those of my employer.