Overall
- 95.5% of Delaware's High School Students Remained in School!
- The dropout rate in Delaware for the 1995-96 school year was 4.5%.
- Of the 31,433 students enrolled in grades 9-12, 1,404 left school.
- Delaware has collected dropout data since 1978-79. The rate remained close to 8% for the first few years and then fell steadily to a low of 4.0% in 1992. For the next few years, the rate increased slightly.
- The small change in 1996 is the first decline since 1992.
- Delaware is one of a handful of states that has a complete dropout data base with individual student information.
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- The dropout rate for males in 1995-96 was 5.2% and 3.7% for females.
- Of the students who left school, 840 (60%) were males, 564 (40%) were females.
- The dropout rate for males declined .4% from 1994-95 while the rate for females increased .1%.
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- The dropout rate for white students (4.0%) was lower than that for African American (5.3%) and Hispanic students (8.3%).
- From 1994-95, the dropout rate increased for Hispanic students (.8%) and decreased for African American students (.5%).
- Of the 1,404 students leaving school, 837 (59.6%) were white, 473 (33.7%) were African American, and 94 (6.7%) were Hispanic.
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- Delaware requires that students attend school up to 16 years of age.
- Of those who left school, 59.9% were 16 to 17 years old.
- The percent was greatest in grade 10, with 444 students leaving school (5.3% of the tenth grade enrollment).
- The number of students who left school in grades 7 and 8 was very small: only 29 students of the 17,449 enrolled.
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- Kent County had the lowest dropout rate (3.7%), a decrease of .6% from 1994-95.
- Sussex County's rate of 4.2% also declined from the previous year's rate of 4.5%.
- New Castle County's rate of 4.8% stayed the same from last year.
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