Los Angeles Unified Supt. John Deasy opened the new school year Tuesday with a speech to administrators in which he urged them to eliminate the dropout rate, and then assigned each one a struggling student to look after.
Much of Deasy's talk at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles celebrated progress in the nation's second-largest school system, including rising graduation rates. The most recent rate was 82%, Deasy said, including students who stayed enrolled longer than four years.
He quickly turned to another figure: 6,950, the number of dropouts from that same class. Deasy said that number could be brought down to zero and implored his audience to "reach out to one youth at a time, every single one of us."
[For more of this story, written by Howard Blume, http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-lausd-deasy-20140806-story.html]
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