Reengaging Students to Finish High School

Reengaging Students to Finish High School

In a perfect world, every kid would graduate high school and be college or career ready. Unfortunately, school dropouts and graduation rates are an issue, but there’s one program in Thurston County aiming to reengage dropouts. Check out the intro to the story from The Olympian.

One of Thurston County’s most effective educational programs doesn’t require the state Legislature to spend billions of dollars, and it doesn’t take place inside K–12 public school buildings. It’s called GRAVITY High School, an innovative program that helps hundreds of young people who might otherwise never earn a high school diploma.

(GRAVITY stands for GED Reengagement Alternative Vocational Individualized Training for Youth, perhaps the world’s longest acronym.)

The state Legislature created the Youth Reengagement System in 2010 – a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Sam Hunt – that enables school districts, local nonprofits and community colleges to tackle the state’s poor graduation rate in a different way.

Read the whole story. View the GRAVITY brochure from ESD 113.