Pandemic Relief Funds Support Success of Washington’s Ninth Graders

When Henterson Carlisle talks about the importance of successfully completing ninth grade, he points to the data.

“Ninth graders are three to five times more likely to fail a class than [students in] any other grade,” said Carlisle, Washington Director of the Center for High School Success (CHSS), a national project of the education advocacy organization Stand for Children. “When a ninth grader fails a class, it reduces their chances of graduating on time by 40%.”

With support from Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding, CHSS is working with school districts across Washington to increase the number of ninth grade students who finish their first year of high school on track to graduate in 4 years. Students are considered “on track” when they pass all their classes in ninth grade.

CHSS coaches school districts to use student behavior, grades, and attendance data to guide their process of creating systems that support the transition into ninth grade, building Ninth Grade Success Teams, and determining interventions that are catered to individual student needs. As a result, each school district uses different strategies to best support their students.

“We meet schools where they are,” Carlisle said. “It may look different from School A to School B.”

In a two-part series, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) will look at two Washington school districts that are working to increase their ninth grade success rates. First up is the Grandview School District in central Washington.

Grandview School District

• Location: Grandview (approximately 41 miles west of Yakima)
• Enrollment (2021–22): 3,661 students
• Graduation rate (Class of 2021): 94%
• Ninth grade on-track rate (2020–21): 45.5%

Jose Rivera, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning for the Grandview School District, saw the chance to focus on ninth grade success as an opportunity to work towards ensuring equitable educational outcomes for all students in the district.

“As a system, we’re being creative and thoughtful about how we respond to students,” he said. “We know that our system supports some students but doesn’t support all. We really interrogate our education system. … Every kid has a unique story that needs to be told and heard, and every kid has a unique need in terms of learning, so how do we ensure as a system that we’re going to meet their needs?”

Before Grandview High School created their Ninth Grade Success Team in 2019, Rivera said it was the norm that ninth graders had multiple teachers for each subject, and the approach to retrieving missing credits was more reactive than proactive.

Now, students have the same teacher for a subject throughout the school year, and the high school offers a class designed for students to make up missing credits and bring their grades up.

Viannei Perez has been teaching that class since it was first offered this past spring. She said she starts the class with a focus on social emotional learning before diving into the modules that teachers have created for students to earn credit.

Social emotional learning is proving important in response to how the COVID-19 pandemic affected students.

“They don’t really have the skills to be a ninth grader yet,” Perez said. “They don’t know how to really communicate with teachers when they need help.”

To build these behavioral skills, Perez created a rewards system last spring in which students would win a raffle ticket for behaviors like completing their work on time. The raffle prizes included items like gum and soda.

When a student won the raffle for soda, they asked Perez to bring in cups so that everyone could have some. When another student won the raffle for gum, he shared it with all his classmates too.

“He didn’t have to, but he did,” Perez said, tearing up. “Those are simple things that just meant so much. It’s a proud moment right there.”

Along with Perez’s class, Grandview High School has also implemented a summer bridge program for incoming ninth graders to spend more time at the high school, as well as worked to provide a deeper understanding of the importance of ninth grade to advisory teachers.

These efforts are yielding some good results, said math teacher Tyler Wakeman. At the end of the fall 2021 trimester, 71% of ninth graders were on track to graduate. This year, that number increased to 75%.

“We’re trying our best,” Wakeman said. “We’re not there yet … but we’re trying, and we’re going to keep trying.”

This story was written by Chelsea Embree, Communications Strategist at OSPI. You can contact the Communications Team at commteam@k12.wa.us.