Slightly more local grads are going on to college

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By Kelli Gauthier kgauthier@timesfreepress.com

Thirteen more Hamilton County high school graduates decided to go on to college in 2009 over the previous year, officials announced Wednesday.

The 72 percent college bound rate is up from 70 percent in 2008, but hasn’t fully recovered after dropping from 73 percent in 2007, records show.

Central High School principal Finley King attributes his school’s college-going success to making students more aware of their options. Seventy-four percent of Central’s 2009 high school graduates attended college this year, up from 65 percent the previous year.

“We have a lot of students who come from homes where their parents didn’t go to college. We have to immerse them in a situation where college is a conversation that everyone is having with them,” he said. “It’s one thing to say you’re a UT fan and you like UT, but what does it take to get there? I don’t want them to think that college is a thing only private school students do.”

About 95 percent of Central students submit at least one college application, because “we just don’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” he said.

While the percentage of seniors going on to college has increased slightly, Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Jim Scales has said he still is concerned about the 19 percent of students who drop out of high school before graduating.

For the first time, Hamilton County Schools and the Public Education Foundation have tracked the percentage of students who begin college in the fall and return for their second year. Of the Hamilton County graduates who enrolled in four-year colleges in the fall of 2008, 89 percent were still in college during the fall of 2009, records show.

Of those who enrolled in two-year colleges during the fall of 2008, 60 percent were still enrolled in 2009.

Johnathon Cisco, 19, is a 2009 graduate of Hixson High School now attending the University of Tennessee on a full academic and cheerleading scholarship.

The first in his family to attend college, Mr. Cisco said his mom, who herself is attending the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, always pushed him to do better.

“She wanted me to do better than she did. She knew that nowadays you need a college degree to almost get a job,” he said. “She pretty much told me if I didn’t make the grades, she wouldn’t let me do sports.”

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