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They are among the 6,000 school-age youth in Philadelphia who are under the supervision of a judge or court. Most of them won't graduate, either.
Nor will the bulk of the 10,000-12,000 Phildelphia teens who become parents this year. About 70 percent of them will drop out within four years of the birth of their first child.
Only three in 10 of the young people in foster care in the city will graduate from high school. Despite its best efforts to track and provide services for them, the school district can only guess how many of its nearly 5,000 homeless kids will graduate. Your guess is as good as any about what percentage of the 80,000 kids who pile up eight or more unexcused absences a year will become dropouts.
Welcome to the parallel universe where thousands of the city's children are hampered by the various pathologies and dysfunctions that make teaching in Philadelphia schools such a monumental challenge.
It's the story behind all the headlines about the district's 45-52 percent graduation rates and its 50 percent dropout rate. Read those numbers at a glance and you might conclude that an average child in Philadelphia schools has only a 50-50 chance of graduating at all and even less of graduating on time.
When you unpack the numbers, dropout rates for Philadelphia public school children who don't get knocked up, locked up or end up in foster homes and institutions is not nearly so alarming.
Those run-of-the-mill students are the ones whose test scores keep creeping up whether they are enrolled in district-run schools or any of the other options offered in this clanking contraption that the school reform commission has cobbled together.
Almost anything we do for them is starting to produce incremental advances. The real challenge is the ones whose issues can't be resolved in a classroom.
They were the focus of a roundtable discussion on dropout rates yesterday at the United Way building in Center City. Professionals from a half-dozen agencies circled up their wagons to explore ways to coordinate services to at-risk kids.
Getting a half-dozen balky bureaucracies to work together is more than a notion. Agencies running programs for pregnant teens or chronic truants or for incarcerated youth have all been treating their own little piece of the problem.
That began to change with the publication last year of "Unfulfilled Promise," a report of Project U-Turn, a dropout prevention effort of the University of Pennsylvania and the district.
"Education was not something the department paid much attention to," said Joseph Kuna, an acting deputy Department of Human Services commissioner.
They're paying attention now. DHS runs its truancy program in cooperation with the district and the courts. To minimize disruptions, they are working to place children in foster homes or institutions close to the schools they had been enrolled in.
Next year, Arise Academy, a charter school, will provide special programming for high-school children in foster care.
"There will be no more than 20 in each class and they will have added social services and extended after-school programs," Kuna said.
Most of the news wasn't of the bricks and mortar magnitude. But there was an air of mutual support and a determination to get shoulder-to-shoulder for the fight to improve outcomes for their clients.
Public Citizens for Children and Youth, which sponsored the roundtable, got twice as many responses as it expected. Everyone seemed fully engaged.
For me, the most encouraging sign was the Nutter administration's willingness to wade into these troubled waters. The mayor's pledge to cut the dropout rate in half was on the table.
Getting big bureacracies to work together is "a grand goal," Lori Shorr, the mayor's chief education officer said. "It's something we can definitely do."
Sorting through the turf issues and in order to "align our social services" is a tall order, she conceded. But where there is a will . . .
"Nothing is going to change this," she said "but political will." *
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith
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