U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan has joined U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota in introducing legislation to crack down on kids who don’t show up for school.

The senators, both Democrats, want to establish a national truancy resource center and a federal grant program for schools, reports Barb Barrett. The competitive grant program would allow schools to work with community groups to discourage truancy, especially in middle school.

The senators say middle school truancy is a strong indicator of drop-out rates in high school.

The grant program’s cost has not been established yet, said Hagan spokesman David Hoffman.

But Klobuchar said she hopes to include it in Congress’ reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Hagan, of Greensboro, is a member of the Senate education committee, which would handle the reauthorization.

Before the state awards more dropout grant money, a committee that decides who gets it will require more information from recipients on what students they want to participate in their programs and what results they expect.

The state Committee on Dropout Prevention is preparing to award its third round of grants to local schools, non-profits and other groups that want money for their programs, Lynn Bonner reports. About 30 percent of the state's ninth graders don't graduate on time, and legislators and school officials have made reducing the dropout rate a focus.

Legislators haven't finished writing the next state budget, but House and Senate negotiators have agreed to spend $12 million on dropout prevention grants next year, said Chris Minard of the state Department of Public Instruction. The legislature spent $7 million on dropout grants in 2007 and $15 million on the grants last year.

More after the jump. 

   Comments (8)

About three dozen House members, including Speaker Joe Hackney, appeared at a news conference Tuesday in support of continuing a grant program aimed at curbing high school dropouts.

The program was approved in 2007 and devoted $22 million over two years to grants. In that time, the Department of Public Instruction handed out 140 grants to school districts, nonprofit organizations and government agencies. Each award came with strings -- the recipient must show they are making good use of the money.

Hackney said he does not yet know how much money will be available to expand the program, but he said the grants are still needed. Three out of 10 high school students leave before graduation and the current economic crisis makes it even tougher for dropouts to find work and have a future, he said.

"We cannot allow them to consign themselves to lifetimes of poverty and uncertainty because of something that happens when they are teenagers," Hackney said.

State Reps. Susan Fisher, an Asheville Democrat and Earline Parmon, a Winston-Salem Democrat will run the bill through the House, Hackney said.

Parmon said that money spent to keep a student in school avoids future costs for unemployment, prison space and food stamps.

"It will save us down the road," Parmon said.

People do a lot of talking about how the state needs to get more students to graduate from high school. Legislators now want goals to back up the chatter.

Legislators are on the verge of recommending that the state Board of Education set a goal of having a 90 percent graduation rate by 2015. The Joint Legislative Commission on Dropout Prevention and High School Graduation put the recommendation in a draft report today, Lynn Bonner reports.

Only about 70 percent of the students who entered 9th grade five years ago graduated by 2008. Legislators called the 90 percent target an "aggressive" goal.

Legislators want each school district to have its own yearly goals beginning with the class of 2010.

"Everyone knows how serious this is," said state Rep. Earline Parmon, the commission's co-chairwoman. "We should be working together to achieve this goal."

The mayor of the Queen City kicked off with a little Queen.

Before making a speech at a Raleigh rally this evening, Republican gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory sat down at a drum set belonging to the Craig Woolard Band and rocked out.

The Charlotte mayor, a classic rock fan, briefly played the beat of the Queen anthem "We Will Rock You" while Americans for Prosperity head Dallas Woodhouse sang raggedly vocals in a manner worthy of McCrory's fabled "garage band" style.

In a 10-minute speech, McCrory then pledged to address the problem of "local, national and international gangs," direct transportation spending to congested roads and reduce the state's high school dropout rate. Most of all, he promised to "change the culture" of Raleigh, saying it's been ruled by "four or five power elites."

"You've got to have a governor that you see — not just at election time, but after the election is over," he said.

Afterward, McCrory was asked how much practice he had before the gig.

"I got kicked out of ninth-grade band class because I'm a bad drummer," he said.

State educators say a recent report is incorrect.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction says a report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center got the state's own calculation of its dropout rate wrong.

The report said the state figured it had a 95 percent graduation rate — far above the report's own calculation of 67 percent using a different methodology.

But DPI spokeswoman Vanessa Jeter wrote Dome in an e-mail that the state's figures actually showed a dropout rate of 69.4 percent, much closer to the report's figure.

After the report came out, Deputy Superintendent J.B. Buxton wrote the researchers on June 3 to inform them of the error and request a correction.

"In presenting the report's findings at a news conference, the researchers acknowledged that North Carolina's numbers were out-of-date in the report and that our state has made significant progress in reporting the issue of high school graduation rates," Jeter wrote.

Previously: N.C. dropout rate ranked 12th worst.

North Carolina has the 12th highest dropout rate, a new report says.

The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center report found that 67 percent of state public school students graduated from high school with a regular diploma in 2005 — below the national average of 70.6 percent.

Only Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Delaware, Georgia, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico and Nevada had higher dropout rates based on the report's calculations.

The rate was calculated using the Cumulative Promotion Index, which tracks whether a student graduates from ninth, tenth, 11th and 12th grades.

For its own calculation of dropout rates under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, North Carolina uses the Cohort Rate, or the percent of students from an entering ninth grade class graduate within four years. Sixteen other states use a similar formula.

Under that calculation, the class of 2005 had a 95 percent graduation rate. The 28-point difference with the Cumulative Promotion Index was the second-largest gap in state-reported rates versus the number calculated by the research center.

Update: Agency say researchers misstated the state's own calculated graduation rate.

Major pieces of the N.C. House's proposed state budget were released this morning, and they show more money for drop out prevention, a big cut for mental health community support services and a potential stumbling block for Gov. Mike Easley's More at Four pre-kindergarten education program.

The House would devote $15 million for drop out prevention grants to communities, more than double what is in the current state budget, Dan Kane reports. Nearly one out of every three students in North Carolina fail to graduate from high school, and state leaders are looking for ways to keep more students in school.

House budget writers also cut more than $86 million from the mental health community support program.

A recent News & Observer series on the state's mental health services reported roughly $400 million in waste in that program. The cut is $65 million more than Easley had sought in his $21.5 billion state budget proposal.

Easley's senior budget adviser, Dan Gerlach, said the governor will not sit for the way House members funded More at Four.

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the cuts.

More after the jump.

   Comments (0)

Sen. Janet Cowell is seeking nearly $76 million in state spending.

The Democratic nominee for state treasurer has sponsored one bill and co-sponsored 24 bills seeking appropriations in the upcoming state budget.

Cowell is the primary sponsor on a bill to give $2.1 million to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences for an environmental education facility at the Prairie Ridge Ecostation.

Among the larger appropriations bills she is cosponsoring: $25 million for a school construction pilot program, $6 million for the Communities in Schools programs on dropout prevention, $5.8 million for the Center for Bioenergy Technologies, $5.6 million for the N.C. Museum of Art, $5.6 million for dropout prevention, $5 million for a strategic plan on biofuels, $5 million for public libraries.

Other large appropriations she is cosponsoring: $4 million for a statewide study on aging, $2 million for the N.C. Arts Council, $1.6 million for a pilot program on dropout prevention in Durham and Vance counties, $1.5 million for a pilot program on adult protective services, $1.4 million for water resource management, $1.2 million for teen pregnancy prevention and $1.2 million for Wake Tech Community College.

She is also cosponsoring bills less than $1 million: Support for caregivers of people with dementia, a statewide literacy program, Kids Voting, treatment of autistic children, services for the developmentally disabled, a legal mediation network, a youth golfing program and the African-American Heritage Commission.

In addition, she is cosponsoring a bill that would give state employees a 7 percent raise.

Update: Her Republican opponent, Rep. Bill Daughtridge, is seeking $19 million in spending.

Sen. Walter Dalton is seeking more than $277 million in state spending.

The Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor has sponsored nine bills and co-sponsored 18 bills seeking appropriations in the upcoming state budget. A longtime state senator, he is serving an advisory role on the budget in the short session.

Dalton is the primary sponsor on bills totaling $208 million: $135 million for grants for local water and sewer projects, $20 million for the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center, $16 million for stem cell research, $14 million for the Cleveland Correctional Center, $10 million to provide services for the developmentally disabled, $5.8 million to help provide high-speed Internet access, $3 million for biotechnology training, $2.5 million for construction at historically black colleges and $2 million for small business entrepeneurship initiatives.

Among the larger appropriations bills he is cosponsoring: $44.7 million for Smart Start early childhood intiatives, $9.5 million for 4-H camps, $3 million for home foreclosure prevention, $3 million for loans for biotechnology start-ups, $1.6 million for a dropout prevention program in Durham and Vance counties, $1.4 million for water resource management and $1.25 million for biotechnology education.

He's also seeking a number of appropriations under $1 million: Teach for America, state GIS improvements, veterinary medicine teaching and research, a statewide infection control program, a literacy program, Kids Voting, a Teacher Cadet Program, an early chilhood initiative, a youth golfing program and a health information management study.

Previously: Sen. Kay Hagan seeks $48 million in state spending.