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What pushes a teenager to suddenly drop out of high school? The answer: any number of very stressful "trigger" events that occur in their final few months in class, researchers at Université de Montréal's Public Health Research Institute have found.
In fact, adolescents exposed to severe stressors are more than twice as likely to drop out in the following few months compared to similar schoolmates who are not exposed, says the study led by UdeM pyschoeducation professor Véronique Dupéré.
The stressors are not always school-related. In fact, most occur away from school and can involve family members (divorcing parents, for example), conflicts with peers, work issues (being laid off), health issues (a car accident) and legal issues.
[...] "These findings show that the risk of high school dropout is not predetermined over the long run," Dupéré said. "Rather, it fluctuates and becomes higher when adolescents have to deal with challenging situations in their lives. School personnel thus need to be aware of their students' changing needs in and out of school to provide them with the right kind of support at the right time."
What has been your experience?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170410123935.htm
[Source]: What triggers a high-school student to suddenly drop out?
[Abstract]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12792/abstract
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:31PM (5 children)
I found it amazing they didn't list pregnancy. I can think of three pregnant girls who dropped out. One went full on welfare mother 2nd generation, one did the GED and eventually became an accountant and turned out perfectly well probably because she had a 10/10 body, one kinda bounced around and turned out OK in the end. There's a lot of social signalling BS where people feel better about their holiness by saying their school is very supportive and has special programs for special people and BS like that, but the reality on the ground is you can have all the programs you want but one of the girls spent most of her second semester of senior year on medical bedrest and this was about one or two decades before online school was a thing and I guess bedrest isn't as much fun when you're sick as it sounds when you're healthy. The welfare mom was 2nd generation and nothing in the programs rewarded her for a degree, in fact having one would encourage the social workers to lean on her to get a job, so being unemployable was strategically useful.
Had a coworker, a good enough sysadmin engineer type, oddly enough dyslexic as all hell. I don't understand how he succeeded in a CLI and tech manual and google for all answers world, but he did somehow. Schools that can afford special education love kids like he must have been, well behaved just got a minor wiring problem and he's some special education reading teacher's walking paycheck. Schools that can't are like F you until you quit which he did. Seeing as his success was about 99% motivation and attitude and less than 1% reading ability, frankly maybe the school was right. Working with someone who can't read or write is really not all that different than working with a foreigner. Not much difference to me between a Korean engineer documenting something in Korean, and a dyslexic dude not even trying to document stuff. That employer was kinda weird cowboy style so they fit right in.
Oh I knew a kid got in some insane motorcycle accident broke a leg and was in the hospital for at least a couple weeks and the schools like "Umm you're not graduating this year you missed too much class" which also means all college plans smashed. I donno what happened to that kid. Why ever go to school again in that situation. You're basically starting your high school life over next September and hoping for a better year. I believe he dropped out and became a motorcycle mechanic.
I can think of another kid was in my electronics class at school disappeared one day for a couple weeks, was informed he can't graduate now because he was gone too long. Apparently got a traffic ticket, family too poor to pay, then got pulled over again and tossed in jail. The judge was some kinda asshole who wouldn't let him go to class via supervised release (maybe he'd violated the rules in the past, I didn't know him well) so he sat in juvie hall and the school wouldn't play along either because he had kind of a record. Ironically he wasn't all that bad of a kid and last I heard he was a electronics bench tech at a local heavy industrial manufacturer, the kinda guy installing those SCADA systems and OSHA electrical stuff. He makes as much money as I do, although he works a lot harder physically and lots of overtime.
I live and grew up in an area with stratified races and social classes and a decade or two before meth arrived so I know no bad stories because any really bad outcomes means they moved away to die. The only stories I have are suburban white kids who failed but turned it around to keep living here. Also when I was in high school they were tracking kids quite intensely so I only knew the motorcycle kid from having grown up about 5 houses away from him, in school there was no mixing classes and the uni kids only had classes with other uni kids, even in gym class I don't think I knew anyone in the lower social classes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @02:52PM
I am shocked, absolutely SHOCKED after hearing about your childhood environment.
OK I'm lying. That dovetails so perfectly with your right-wing beliefs. You grew up in a town that sounds like the breeding ground for such mentalities. Class stratification, race segregation, yup! At least you don't seem to have come out of it with serious problems, nothing a little education and worldly experience won't fix!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @04:33PM (2 children)
better not give those kids a free lunch, that woman is clearly a degenerate that was not failed by the lack of abortions or religious guilt manipulations by others. She chose to drop out!
Granted, she chose to have sex, too. but 18 years of hardship, if not longer, is a high price to pay compared to sex education and availability of female health services.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 12 2017, @09:35PM (1 child)
I find it a fascinating display of projection that in most of the examples I provided it was the hyper-left-wing education system that screwed those kids over by telling them they can't graduate because they missed too many class hours for a variety of reasons. The concept that becoming educated is the same thing as serving a prison sentence is kinda bizarre to start with, but its what we got, ya gotta do the time to get the diploma and most of the kids I can think of who failed to get the diploma failed because they had a realistic excuse for not doing the time ranging from jail to pregnancy to hospital.
Yet you go on some crazy rant seeming to imply the right wing was out to get them. The people that screwed those kids over were quite literally 60s boomer hippies of the most extreme sort. Leftism exists solely to perpetuate itself, not to help defenseless little kids or something. The dropouts were interesting examples of that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @10:28PM
so then why mention pregnancy if the problem you state is tardiness or absenteeism?
i find it hard to understand how a 60s boomer hippie has anything to do with some girl getting pregnant and having no support system available, the sort of future that buzzard hopes to achieve for his district. he doesnt strike me as an aging hippie. he strikes me as a shoot the commies when he sees the whites of their eyes type.
i dont know anyone that got kicked out of school for not getting enough credit hours. in fact, they graduated later as a form of punishment--they were told it would take longer!
anyone dropping out by me knew they wanted to do that so they could smoke weed and play the guitar and wait for their big break that never came. perhaps that is the intent you were aiming at for the pregant girls, but the girls are not running with the drug crowd. their getting pregnant because they are fertile and dont have good access to healthcare because its forbidden or taboo for teenagers to have sex.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Wednesday April 12 2017, @09:18PM
Never knew any dropouts myself... I should have dropped out though. I was miserable my last year. Nothing to do, really, except sleep in every class and wait. Nearly everyone in my high school class from 9th grade graduated.
Not everyone though. A couple died in gang fights, or fighting drug dealers. A guy I used to hang out with was expelled the day before graduation for drug dealing; we knew he'd get arrested for it eventually though. Some of us had tried to warn his parents, our own parents, school officials, etc but they did not believe us (he was very personable and got good grades...) and so he got picked up in a police sting. He couldn't have waited a couple days to sell them drugs, I guess.