What Kansas schools can learn from Dodge City USD 443’s post-secondary success efforts

DODGE CITY — School leaders in Dodge City USD 443 were flummoxed.

For years, the district had maintained respectable graduation rates — great, even, for a district with high rates of at-risk and low-income students. With graduation percentages in the mid to upper 80s, Dodge City USD 443 most years trailed the average statewide graduation rate, but not by much.

What didn’t make sense, though, at least not initially, was the dismal rate at which students went on to pursue any kind of education or training after high school, a measure called post-secondary effectiveness that the Kansas State Department of Education started tracking in 2015.

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In Dodge City, only about 1 in 5 students who entered Dodge City High School as freshman enrolled in any kind of post-high school education, per a five-year average of the first half of the 2010s.

Although few districts have yet been able to reach the Kansas State Board of Education’s goal of at least 70% post-secondary effectiveness, Dodge City’s rate, 21.4%, was among the lowest in the state.

Why weren’t students doing anything else after graduating high school?

School leaders had a few ideas, and after Superintendent Fred Dierksen arrived to the district six years ago, Dodge City USD 443 began turning its rates around, nearly doubling its post-secondary success rate to 40.4% in the latest data collection.

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It’s a roadmap to success that other Kansas school districts should look at, Education Commissioner Randy Watson previously told the Kansas State Board of Education.

Here’s how the district made it happen.

The challenges Dodge City USD 443 faces

The first thing to understand about Dodge City USD 443 is that it is not at all like any other district in Kansas, Dierksen said.

With two of the nation’s largest meatpacking plants in the community employing thousands of workers who come from around the world, the district’s 7,200 students are more than 80% Hispanic, and only 15% white. Students of other races make up the other 5%.

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That means that many of the district’s families are immigrants, and students represent about 45 different countries and over 20 languages when they walk the school hallways, said Diana Mendoza, the district’s director of diversity and English for Speakers of Other Languages.

“That’s unbelievable, and it makes us very unique. We’re not the small Kansas town that everybody might think we are,” Dierksen said. “With that comes some challenges, but also some opportunities. We’ve embraced that, and the families we serve care very much about their children. They trust in our education system, and they rely on us to provide that.”

While the district has been able to get students to graduation, it has taken a different kind of approach compared to suburban districts in Johnson or Sedgwick counties, said Scott Springston, the deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction.

After a lawsuit against the Kansas Legislature found that legislators had unconstitutionally failed to adequately and equitably fund education, it was districts like Dodge City — and by virtue, its most in-need students — who saw the biggest benefit from increased state dollars to local school districts, Springston said.

“Our approach here in Dodge has been to be very cognizant of that, and to be very understanding — meeting kids and families where they are,” the deputy superintendent said. “When you think about how large an organization this is, it’s a very complex undertaking, but it’s necessary to get adequacy and equity for a kid here in Dodge City.

“Those words mean something different here, compared to a place like Andover. It requires a different set of resources, not just financially, but in terms of staff and opportunities.”

Getting those students to programs, training and majors after high school, however, has required even more work with students and families, Dierksen said. Many of the immigrant families come to Dodge City with the idea of going straight to work, and it’s an ideal that often trickles down to their children.

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To help students get into post-secondary education and training, Dodge City USD 443 worked with community partners

Additionally, southwest Kansas is in somewhat of a higher education desert, with no four-year universities serving that portion of the state, Mendoza said. That can make it hard for students to visualize themselves in programs or careers, especially if those ambitions ultimately lead them away from Dodge City.

That’s why Dodge City has worked with other community organizations, Dodge City Community College and Fort Hays State and Newman universities to bring bachelor-level programs to the city through the Rural Education & Workforce Alliance, said Maria Kane, the career pathway coordinator for the high school. Before moving to that position in 2018, Kane worked with the area’s chamber of commerce, which has helped in forging connections between Dodge City High School students and other organizations in the city.

The program currently offers bachelor’s degrees in nursing, social work, speech pathology and elementary education, with the hope to expand those options and university partnerships in the coming years.

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By offering those programs locally, students are more likely to seek some post-secondary education, as well as remain in the area once they complete their degrees, Kane said.

But even then, Kane and other high school leaders said much of the district’s improvement in post-secondary effectiveness over the past five years has come from a focus on non-four-year degree programs.

The district has bolstered its relationship with Dodge City Community College — even working with transportation officials to improve infrastructure and physical access for students to the campus — while also bringing in community business leaders and workers to help students see themselves

“While four-year degrees are great for some jobs, they’re not the end-all, be-alls for everything,” Kane said. “You can go to the military. You can get that workforce training or that credential and see even more success, and often even more so, than what you would see with a four-year degree."

“That’s not to say we’re against that, but we want our students to have some direction before they go and spend some valuable resources in time and money,” she added.

Mike Martinez, an associate principal who has worked at Dodge City High School for the past 26 years, said the increase in post-secondary effectiveness has also come from a concentrated effort to work with each student individually to chart out their career paths from earlier grades.

It’s correlated with an overall push across Kansas to implement individualized plans of study with greater fidelity, so students can explore careers early on in their K-12 careers and use high school as a chance to begin earning credits, certifications and other work-based skills and knowledge.

“There’s a big mind shift here in the building as far as knowing who our students are, and knowing that they like to stay local, and doing what do we need to do to help them be as successful as they can be,” he said.

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Kansas school districts continue on push for better post-secondary effectiveness

While the work over the past five years to get to a 40%  post-secondary effectiveness rate wasn’t necessarily easy, superintendent Dierksen and other school leaders realize the harder work will be to get to the Kansas State Board of Education’s goal of at least 70%.

That rate was set on a Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce study that found that 71% of jobs in Kansas will eventually require some level of education beyond a high school diploma.

But despite any challenges in working with large numbers of at-risk and low-income students, school leaders are confident that their students are just as capable as any others, and only need be given the opportunity to shine.

“I think a lot of our students have seen their parents work really hard,” Kane said. “The work at the packing plants can be really labor intensive, and the students see their parents working multiple jobs, coming home physically exhausted. The students tend to have that same desire and work ethic, because it’s modeled at home.”

It’s that work ethic and those kinds of strides that can be hard to measure on any one test, namely the state assessments, said Springston, the deputy superintendent.

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He, Dierksen and others hope that other districts and lawmakers around the state take that into account when evaluating the success of any one student, let alone a whole district full of students who have taken on adversity and succeeded nonetheless.

“We’ve accepted who we are, and we’ve embraced it in trying to put in systems to help us succeed,” Dierksen said. “We’ve seen progress. We’re not at the numbers the state wants us to be at, but we know that, and we’re working toward it and we see a lot of indications that we’re on the right track.”

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at ‪785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Dodge City USD 443 is a model for Kansas schools' post-secondary success