Colorado saw more students graduate from high school last year than in 2022, with the state experiencing one of the biggest boosts to its graduation rate in recent years, while fewer students dropped out, according to data released Tuesday morning by the Colorado Department of Education.
The graduation and dropout numbers from the state’s class of 2023 are encouraging to state education officials, particularly after the dropout rate in 2022 increased for the first time since 2015.
Colorado’s four-year graduation rate in 2023 jumped by 0.8 percentage points to 83.1% as 56,812 students earned their high school diploma — 528 more students than in 2022, according to a media release from the state education department.
Improvements were widespread, with graduation rates increasing from the year before or staying consistent in 65% of Colorado’s 179 school districts, according to CDE.
Graduation rates among classes of students who take longer than four years to graduate high school also improved. The state tracks students who take up to seven years to earn their high school diploma. Last year’s five-year graduation rate was 86.1%, up from 85.7%. The seven-year graduation rate hit 87.6%, inching up from 87.3%.
The state’s dropout rate fell from 2.2% in 2022 to 2.1% last year, with 859 fewer students leaving before earning their degree. A total of 9,665 students in grades 7-12 dropped out in 2023.
The outcomes are “all moving in the same direction for improvement,” said Johann Liljengren, director of CDE’s Dropout Prevention and Student Re-engagement Office. “We’re seeing kind of a continued upward trajectory with the graduation rate.”
Colorado’s four-year high school graduation rate has continued to increase since 2010, when the state changed how data is reported. The only exception to that streak of improvements was in 2021 at the height of the pandemic, when the graduation rate declined for the first time in more than a decade.
“Given the challenges that our students and educators have faced over the last four years, I am glad that in Colorado we continue to see an improved graduation rate and a decreasing dropout rate,” Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said in a statement. “It shows students know the value of staying in school and receiving a quality education.”
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Still, significant gaps remain for particular groups of students, including students of color and students who come to school with additional challenges.
Compared with white students, whose four-year graduation rate last year was 88%, Black students’ graduation rate was 78.6% while the graduation rate among Hispanic or Latino students was 76.1% and the graduation rate among American Indian or Alaska Native students was 68%.
And compared with the state’s overall four-year graduation rate of 83.1%, the graduation rate for students with disabilities was 69.3% while the graduation rate for students learning English was 69.4%. Meanwhile, the graduation rate for students living in poverty was 73.3%; the graduation rate for migrant students was 67.2%; the percentage of homeless students who graduated in four years was 58%; and the percentage of students living in foster care who graduated in four years was 36.2%.
“When we start to look at student groups and start to disaggregate some of that data, we are seeing improvements,” Liljengren said. “In many cases, we’re seeing those groups improve faster than the statewide rate, but they’re still really large gaps for many of them.”
Prodding kids toward graduation often comes down to building relationships with them
Colorado’s improved graduation and dropout rates last year coincided with continued struggles across districts to draw students to class regularly. Nearly 270,000 students — equal to more than 1 in 4 — were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year, meaning they missed at least 10% of school days. That was fewer than the number of students who were reported as chronically absent during the height of the pandemic throughout the 2021-22 school year, when a record 36% of students missed school consistently.
“In order for us to continue to get better, we are going to have to see all three of them (graduation, dropouts and chronic absenteeism) continue to improve or in some ways we might hit a ceiling … of not being able to improve that much farther or not improve as fast,” Liljengren said.
Among the districts that have continued to see their graduation rate increase is Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs, where 82.3% of students from the class of 2023 graduated in four years, up from 80% in 2022.
Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel attributes much of that boost to the relationships that district and school staff members work to build with their students.
“To me, it goes back to the old adage that students don’t care what you know until they know you care,” Birhanzel said, “and our students know that everyone will go above and beyond to help them be successful.”
In Harrison School District 2, which serves a diverse body of students, graduation coaches help keep students on track, monitoring where students are in fulfilling credit requirements. Those coaches meet with students who fall behind and their families to devise a plan for credit recovery or summer school so they have a better chance of catching up before their senior year, Birhanzel said.
District employees, primarily counselors and administrators, also conduct home visits to talk to families at the time and location most convenient for them, sometimes at their workplace or over Zoom. That way, they can educate families about what it will take for their child to graduate and gather their input in how to set their student up to excel, Birhanzel said.
“We have to get out of our comfort space of our school building, and we need to meet them on their territory and help them understand that we’re partners in their child’s success,” she said.
Additionally, the district offers a variety of class schedules for students, including night school for kids working a full-time job during the day and afternoon courses for kids focused on an internship in the morning.
“Really responding to the individual needs of our students has allowed them to be successful both in life in paying for bills and getting their graduation certificate,” Birhanzel said.
Like many other Colorado school districts, Harrison School District 2 continues to see lower graduation rates of students with more challenging life circumstances, including students with disabilities, kids learning English and kids living in poverty.
Part of the difficulty of getting some of those students across the graduation stage is due to the district’s highly transient population, Birhanzel said, with only 25% of its students sticking with the district from kindergarten through senior year.
“We have a very transient group that come in as juniors with maybe two credits or they come in as ninth graders and can’t read,” she said. “And so we have huge gaps to close, and we do everything in our power to close them.”
Students who are constantly moving between districts often have a harder time staying on pace in their classes. Statewide data from 2023 indicates that fewer students are shuffling between districts than in 2022 — in 121 districts, a smaller percentage of kids in grades K-12 moved districts last year.
Harrison School District 2 is showing promise with graduating students from low-income households. Last year, nearly 54% of the district’s 12,606 students in preschool through 12th grade qualified for free and reduced lunch, a federal measure of poverty. Eighty percent of kids living in poverty graduated within four years in 2023, just a few percentage points less than the district’s four-year graduation rate of 82.3%.
“In a district where you have a high poverty rate, you believe in every student and every student rises to the occasion,” Birhanzel said. “We set high expectations for our teachers to set for our students, and then we provide the resources to make sure that they meet those expectations.”
Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, also made strides with its four-year graduation rate, ticking up from 76.5% in 2022 to 79% last year.
Part of that success is driven by a district effort to help students find meaning in their coursework, sometimes by taking career and technical education classes or taking on internships that match their interests, said Samantha Haviland, executive director of career and college success for DPS.
“Helping students see their future and themselves in their future, find purpose in their coursework, all of that is incredibly important,” Haviland said.
Still, gaps in graduation rates among different groups of students also continue to affect DPS. Students with disabilities, for example, had a graduation rate of 63.1% last year — about 16 percentage points behind the district’s overall four-year graduation rate.
DPS is currently studying what is preventing students with disabilities from graduating on time and creating a plan to better track the district’s progress with helping those students on the path to graduation, Haviland said.
That approach speaks to the district’s focus on “accelerating the trajectory of our historically underserved and/or most marginalized student groups,” said the district’s chief of academics, Simone Wright.
“We are under the direction of a leader (Superintendent Alex Marrero) who is committed at all costs,” Wright said, “to ensuring that ability, language and race and culture are no longer a predictor of student success.”