Image courtesy of TVW
Washington’s high school graduation rate continues to improve, but the Governor says there’s still plenty of room to grow.
The class of 2022 saw 82.3% receiving their diploma after 4 years with even more who took longer but still graduated. When broken down into groups, ethnicities like Native Americans had a graduation rate of less than 68% and kids in foster care just over 53%, but that foster care graduation rate is up 5% from the previous year.
Governor Jay Inslee told his Results Washington group they want everyone to get a fair shot and that there’s still work to do. “Our students are not all cookie cutter,” Inslee says, “They’re all individuals.” So Inslee says they want to make education as much of an individualized opportunity for success as possible by meeting the students’ needs.
One of those individuals is Mohamed Kasein, who had his GED but earned his diploma and got an actual graduation ceremony while in rehabilitation at the Oakridge Community Facility in Lakewood. Kasein says, “That felt great because the feeling like that…it just makes me want to thrive for more, you know, like a good addiction.” “Mo”, as he’s called, has continued his education and now wants to study psychology so he can use his experiences to help others.
Janelys Cantun told the Governor she went from 15 and pregnant in foster care to a mother and grandmother in her 40s, now just waiting for her graduation from the “High School Plus” program, which her daughter is also about to finish. “I’m so thankful for that,” Cantun says, “because I have never seen a future for myself in any kind of way other than like the streets and what the streets will provide.”
Governor Inslee says homeless kids also face educational challenges so he’s asking lawmakers to help them with housing because he says when considering money to house homeless youth, he hopes the legislature will look at it as much as an education issue as a homelessness issue.
The Governor also reminded his Results Washington panel that he would like to scale up and speed up the improvements we’ve made to take those successes and run with them.
You can watch the entire Results Washington meeting on TVW here.