Northern Lehigh School District has made the grade based on a new method to determine high school graduation rates.

Aileen Yadush, high school principal, recently informed the school board of the different four-year Cohort Graduation Rate Calculation.Yadush said the State Department of Education recently announced the adoption of the method to make state to state comparisons and to more accurately reflect the number of high school students who graduate from their school in a four-year period.The method measures the number of students who graduate within four years of the date on which they enter ninth grade. This number is adjusted each year to reflect transfers into the district, which is added to the cohort, and out of the district to other schools, which is deleted from the cohort.This information is collected when students enter the high school from earlier school records, or from transcripts of sending schools when a student transfers into the district. Collected data is entered into the student data system, and is later extracted from the system and forwarded to Pennsylvania Information Management System (PIMS) for state reports.Recently, Yadush said the PDE published the results of the new accounting method, at which time it was reported that Northern Lehigh's graduation rate dropped to 85.1-percent, down about 11 percent from the previous year. The PDE reported that of the 197 students who began the ninth grade in the fall of 2006, 166 of them graduated in the spring of 2010, which would mean that 31 students from the original ninth grade class of 2006-2007 were nongraduates in 2010, she said.But, that number didn't seem accurate to the district administration, and an investigation was conducted to verify the accuracy of the reported data, Yadush said.She said the results of that investigation were that seven of the 31 students listed as nongraduates actually did graduate with their class on time, but were mistakenly reported as nongraduates because of an error made in their entries in the student data system reporting fields; four of the 31 were reported in the incorrect cohort and were actually ninth-graders in 2005-2006; one of the 31 transferred to another school and was incorrectly reported as a nongraduate; and three of the 31 special needs students chose to continue to work toward IEP (Individualized Education Plan) goals beyond their senior year.Once the corrections had been made within PIMS, Yadush said the correct graduation rate for the high school under the new method was 173 graduates of 192 students in the cohort, or 90.1-percent. The targeted graduation rate as per the Cohort Graduation Rate Calculation is 82.5-percent.Yadush said PDE has verified the new graduation rate, and it will be reported correctly on their website.In the meantime, she said the district has taken steps to ensure that student data is accurate and correctly recorded so that state reports generated from PIMS data will be accurate in the future. These steps are to designate personnel from each building who will work together to create a checklist that will help to uniformly input enrollment data on each student (graduate, transfer), as well as extensive training on the student data management system in use by the district.The district, Yadush said, will continue its efforts to ensure that all students have the means necessary to earn a diploma. In addition, extensive counseling is available to students at risk for not graduating, coordination and communication with students and their families in times of crisis, as well as access to multiple social services and alternative educational opportunities are made available in many cases, she said.The district administration and faculty are committed to encouraging students who need additional time to complete their diploma to do so regardless of its PDE reported graduation rate, Yadush said.