LAUSD launched Student Recovery Day Monday to bring dropouts back to
class. (Creative Commons licensed.)

As a pupil services and attendance counselor, Francisco Vasquez has spent the past five years working with some of the Los Angeles Unified School District's most at-risk students.

Throughout his tenure mentoring middle and high school students, the Fremont High counselor has proudly racked up a number of battle scars in the ongoing war to keep kids in class.

Vasquez prepared to earn more of those scars Monday when he joined around 160 administrators and counselors, who fanned out around the city tracking down dropouts from Fremont, Fairfax, Polytechnic and Wilson high schools during the district's inaugural Student Recovery Day.

On school campuses, clerks and secretaries manned the phones to reach absent students and their families. Within the first hour, Fremont officials had already gotten one student to return to class.

"We're here to help," Vasquez said. "We want to see [students] be successful, to graduate."

Low graduation rates and high numbers of dropouts have plagued LAUSD for decades. However, its dropout rate decreased 17 percent in 2007-08, according to the California Department of Education. Graduation rates jumped from 64.6 percent in 2006-07 to 72.4 percent the following school year.

But the dropout rates were calculated using a new statewide database that makes tracking students easier. Previously, students who had died or simply transferred without informing their former school would be inaccurately counted as dropouts.

Despite the new tracking system, district officials attributed the improved dropout rates largely to schools' dropout prevention and recovery plans. Counselors at LAUSD's roughly 660 schools regularly make phone calls and home visits to find out the reason behind a student's truancy and offer any services necessary to get him or her to go back to school.

Those reasons can range from frustration over not understanding the curriculum, to psychiatric ailments to a sense of not fitting in. At Fremont High about 200 students last year finished the required coursework, but couldn't get their diplomas because they did not pass the California High School Exit Exam.

But most of the time, students drop out of school because they don't believe in themselves, says Marquis Jones, an advisor at Fremont.

"It's a lack of motivation with students," Jones said. "They don't think they can be anything."

On Monday, the district hoped to make a dent in getting students to return to the classroom. The brainchild of school board member Steve Zimmer, Student Recovery Day saw board members and district brass, including Superintendent Ramon Cortines, accompanying counselors on the day's rounds.

"We need to look at the individual needs of the kids rather than saying they're just a number," Cortines said. "It is not about how many we get back. It's about letting this city, this community, know that we care about students."