WAKE COUNTY, N.C. — The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction released a report indicating a rise in high school graduation rates across the state.
The state’s graduation rate rose to 86.9% from 86.5% in 2022-23. While the NCDPI touts improvements across the board in the 2023-24 Accountability Report, the Wake County Public School System is doing the same.
According to NCDPI data from WCPSS, the four-year graduation rate hit a record high of 91.3%, up from 89.9% in 2023. This bested the previous high of 90.8% in 2020.
Based on this latest data, there’s also an increase in proficiency for standardized state tests across the district.
Many high schools in Wake County saw a rate bump of up to 5 percentage points from last year’s class to 2023-24, including Wakefield High School.
Wakefield High School principal Malik Bazzell said there’s a reason for that.
“I think that at Wakefield, we had to recognize it's going to take a three-pronged approach where students, parents and staff have to all work together, and it really starts out with the communication,” Bazzell said.
Bazzell, principal of Wakefield High since 2015, said attendance during the pandemic taught the staff a lot about dealing with challenges.
“Absenteeism was really the big change that we were affected by. And I think it's something that affected all schools nationwide,” Bazzell said.
The principal and his academic village had to correct the course but how?
Bazzell said they tried everything from follow-up phone calls to dedicating the assistant principal to doing home visits if necessary, creating a committee strictly for attendance to entice engagement and sometimes helping high schoolers find a way to get to school.
Shifting resources, such as adding more than one teacher to a class as needed and beefing up the orientation before the school year began, became priority No. 1.
“This is our motto, is that we're warm demanders. And so what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we have high expectations for our students, but at the same time, we're going to provide supports for them,” Bazzell said.
Their philosophy was grounded in the belief that parents must be informed about the educational process. It's philosophy an educator such as Tony Calabria fully embraced.
“I liked how we were reaching students. I liked how we didn't give them an excuse not to come,” Calabria said.
This is no small feat given the reality the most recent batch of grads entered high school in the fall of 2020 — the heart of a public health crisis.
Calabria, who has taught at Wakefield High for more than 20 years, believed drawing a line in the sand about how you attended classes remotely was important for overall engagement.
“In my classroom, every student had their camera on. It was a non-negotiable,” Calabria said. “When you set rules and guidelines like that from the very beginning, it becomes the norm.”
The pandemic gave Calabria and many other teachers a chance to engage students using technology outside class, carrying forward creative strategies for sustained engagement like scavenger hunts. Students who scored well or showed progress from test to test would be offered the chance to join in on scavenger hunting to incentivize young minds to keep up their grades. He said if you were the student who won the scavenger hunt, you could post a picture of your prize all day in online group sessions.
“Our role was to make education more interesting, more fun, and we had to get creative,” Calabria said. “Then everyone wanted to do that. The thing that's been the constant for our students' success has been great students and awesome community involvement.”
Those strategies impressed a retired school teacher from New York whose grandchildren attended Wakefield High.
“You saw a lot of structure, and it made you feel like you didn’t have to carry the weight on your back of worrying about your kids because you know they were at a good place where people care about them,” Elemenia Glover said.
A 2024 graduate, Larry Thomas, said the availability of teachers after school made all the difference in his four years on campus.
“With them being able to sit after class and taking time out of their day to just explain what happened in that unit or what happened today. I really appreciated that,” Thomas said.
Thomas overcame his mother’s stroke his senior year and the hardships of remote learning during the pandemic to walk across the stage in late spring of this year.
Glover said parental input and participation are visible. She said she was taught to tell students to be capable, connected and contributors. Glover said she sees many of those traits in students because of their teachers.
“Awesome professionals,” Glover said. “What is the expectation of the parents and their roles. Giving us that information is so important. Learn who the people are who are educating your kids and how they give support.”
The new goal for graduation rates is 98% for this school year.
“It's awesome to see the kids grow and flourish. That's why we're in this job,” Calabria said.