Wallowa seniors flip their tassels near the conclusion of the school’s graduation ceremony Saturday, May 29, 2021.

LA GRANDE — Graduation rates in public high schools in Union and Wallowa counties look strong overall, according to 2020-21 statistics released by the Oregon Department of Education.

The statistics, put out on Thursday, Jan. 20, indicate that five of the nine public high schools in the two counties posted graduation rates of at least 90% and that rates were up at four of the high schools.

Imbler High School is at the head of the class with a graduation rate of 100%. Imbler’s rate was up 14.29% from 2019-20 when 85.71% of seniors graduated. Imbler also had a perfect graduation rate in 2018-19.

“Students, staff, parents and the community are what makes this happen,” said Doug Hislop, the Imbler School District’s superintendent.

Hislop added that the role parents play in boosting students cannot be underestimated.

“Parents and teachers are co-educators,” he said.

The Enterprise School District had the second highest graduation rate in Union and Wallowa counties at 95.65%, up from 2019-20 when it had a graduation rate of 85.37%. Joseph and Wallowa high schools, Wallowa County’s other two public high schools, also were in the 90% range. Joseph’s rate was 91.67%, down 1.19% from 2019-20, and Wallowa’s was 90%, up from 83.33% in 2019-20.

Union had the third highest graduation rate in the area at 94.12%. Union School District Superintendent Carter Wells credits the high mark to his staff’s ability to identify students that need extra attention.

“We are very fortunate to have a strong staff who early on can identify students who are at risk,” he said, adding that Union High School’s small size makes it easier for staff to get to know their students and help them be able to make their commencement walks.

“They do all they can to get them to what we call the promised land,” Wells said.

La Grande and Cove high schools posted almost identical graduation rates: 85.71% of Cove’s seniors graduated, up 1.5% from 2019-20, and La Grande graduated 85.99%, down from 89.89% the previous year.

La Grande School District Superintendent George Mendoza said he is proud of how LHS students are doing in terms of graduating despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’m just very pleased with our students. They’ve endured a challenging time and they’ve earned their diploma,” he said. “I’m very pleased and happy for them, and I have a lot of gratitude for our staff and our families that worked collaboratively to ensure the success of our students.”

Powder Valley High School’s graduation rate was 80%, which was down from 100% in 2019-20, while Elgin High School had a graduation rate of 71.43%, which was down from 82.76% in 2019-20.

State grad rates drop

The average four-year graduation rate in the state went from 83% for the class of 2020 to 81% for the class of 2021, which graduated more than 37,000 seniors. About 8,900 students didn’t graduate with their class.

This is despite a nearly 50% chronic absentee rate for high school seniors during the last school year, meaning nearly half of students missed more than 10% of their classes.

Jon Wiens, director of accountability and reporting at the Education Department, said teacher records of attendance were inconsistent between online and in-person instruction and between districts, calling into question the accuracy of the high absentee figure.

Prior to the pandemic, regular school attendance rates in Oregon stood at about 80%.

High school graduation rates have picked up in Oregon since the second decade of the 2000s, increasing, overall, by one to three percentage points every year since about 2010.

“It’s both a big deal to thousands of students when the graduation rate is upward by two percentage points, and I think it’s a big deal to those students who do not graduate from high school when the graduation rate declines by two percentage points,” said David Liebowitz, a professor at the University of Oregon’s College of Education who studies education methods and policy.

When it comes to squaring a high absentee rate with only a slight decrease in the graduation rate, Marc Seigel, communications director at the Education Department wrote in an email, “The class of 2021 had nearly three years of in-person high school prior to the beginning of the pandemic. Many of these students were well on their path to graduation when the pandemic began, and were able to maintain that momentum despite the challenges of the pandemic.”

No traditional four-year high school in Oregon experienced an increase in graduation rates by 10% or more. A mix of 43 traditional four-year high schools and charter schools had graduation rates of 100%. The lowest graduation rate in the state was at Southern Oregon Success Academy, an alternative school near Grants Pass, which graduated just one of its 48 seniors.

Overall, about 40% of Oregon’s 539 high schools had graduation rates below the state average. About 100 had rates below 70%, and about half of those were alternative schools or virtual charters.

According to Liebowitz, “Just a small subset of schools can have a major impact on the state’s overall graduation rate. A very small number of schools contribute to a lot of the high school dropouts around the state.”

Oregon’s dropout rate in 2021 was just under 2%, according to data from the Education Department.

Liebowitz said it’s hard to pinpoint any one reason for a decline or increase in graduation rates in an individual year, but a loss of two percentage points in graduation rate means thousands of students.

“I think that the right way to think about this is to think about the individual students who are on the margin completing, or not completing, high school and the life opportunities that implies for them if they do or don’t complete high school,” he said.

— Oregon Capital Chronicle reporter Alex Baumhardt contributed to this report.