The Iowa Department of Education today (Fri) announced a four-year graduation rate of 87.5 percent for Iowa’s high school class of 2023, up a tenth of a percent from the previous year.
The Storm Lake Community School District had a four-year graduation rate of 46 percent, but many Storm Lake High School students opt to take a 5th year in the district’s charter program.
Alta Aurelia had a 100 percent four-year graduation rate last year…East Sac County 95 percent…Newell Fonda, Ridge View, and OA-BCIG 94 percent…South Central Calhoun 93.5 percent…Pocahontas Area 86 percent…and Sioux Central 85 percent.
The 2023 graduation rate was calculated using a newly corrected code after the Department of Ed identified an error in the legacy calculation code that had been used for at least ten years to determine the state’s four and five-year graduation rates. The Department’s Information and Analysis Services team discovered that mobile students who transferred between districts and later dropped out had been inadvertently removed from the student cohort rather than included as non-graduates. As a result, graduation rates for the previous ten years were calculated and reported at a higher than actual rate.
Corrected four-year graduation rates for the graduating classes of 2021 and 2022 dropped slightly from what were originally reported. The corrected four-year graduation rate for the class of 2022 is 87.4 percent, down 2.5 percent from what was previously announced. For the graduating class of 2021, the corrected rate is 87.8 percent, down 2.4 percent from the original number.
Iowa’s corrected five-year graduation rate for 2023 will be released next spring. The five-year rate was 89.7 percent for the Class of 2022, and 90.1 percent for the Class of 2021.
