Knock, knock — it’s your education

Some high school dropouts might be surprised this summer to answer their door and find an educator looking for them.

Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8 is launching a door-to-door campaign to track down dropouts and offer them a second chance at graduation.

The district wants to enroll them in a recently approved program designed for at-risk and expelled students. It begins this fall.

Fountain-Fort Carson staffers plan to comb through school records and talk to friends and family to track down former students, by methods including showing up on their doorsteps. If successful, most of the 60 available slots would be filled by students not currently enrolled in school.

The program, Ombudsman Educational Services Second Chance Program, will offer online courses in the afternoon and evening. Instruction will be tailored to each student, and classes will be no more than 30 students at a time, said Katie Weikel, principal of Fountain-Fort Carson’s Lorraine Secondary School, an alternative school.

The program’s location has not been determined.

Weikel said she thinks the program will eventually improve the district’s graduation rate.

Although the district will initially recruit dropouts, the effort will shift to preventing students from dropping out once doors open, she said.

For years Lorraine Secondary School has worked to capture students who struggle in a traditional school setting, she said, but it wasn’t reaching all such students.

Expelled students, for example, were forced to take online courses from home, where the distractions could mean the difference between staying on course or dropping out. Other students just needed extra attention that Lorraine, with 95 students, was not able to provide.

Ombudsman is operated by Educational Services of America, a for-profit company based in Nashville, Tenn., that specializes in alternative and special education. The program will cost $300,000 a year and was approved by the school board last month.

Former Superintendent Dwight Jones, now Colorado’s education commissioner, said last month the program would help meet goals set by Gov. Bill Ritter to cut the statewide dropout rate and achievement gap in half in the next 10 years.

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