Graduation Rates Reflect Klamath Promise Efforts 

• Klamath County School District: 75.9 percent – 7 percent higher than 2014
• Klamath Falls City Schools: 65.3 percent – 2 percent higher than 2014
• Oregon: 73.8 percent – 2 percent higher than in 2014

The rise in grad rates is a signal that initiatives like the Klamath Promise are working.

“I think this is a step along the way,” said Anne Hiller Clark, Klamath Promise coordinator. “It shows us how we’re doing right now. It gives us a reason to keep our efforts going.”

Even though four-year rates improved this year, Hiller Clark said the Klamath Promise focuses on the five-year completion rate because it includes more than just the standard high school diploma.

“It offers a broader picture and, I think in a lot of ways, it’s a more useful picture,” she said. “Because it includes the extended diplomas and the modified diplomas and the GEDs.”

The five-year completion rate released this year is for the class that started high school in 2010-11; the same class that finished its four years in 2014. It is not the same group of students who finished their four-year graduation in 2015.

• Klamath Falls City Schools five-year completion rate: 77.8 percent

• Klamath County School District five-year completion rate: 82.3 percent

After a little more than two years in existence, Klamath Promise is starting to track its activities, to see exactly if and how it affects graduation rates.

“Try and determine those outcomes. Try and quantify them,” Hiller Clark said. “We’re still fairly early in our efforts to able to definitively point to something and say, ‘that is the direct result of the Klamath Promise.’ There’s so many factors that go into a student’s life that affects their success in school.”

But helping address all those factors in a student’s life is one way the Klamath Promise is working to make a difference by partnering with organizations such as Klamath Basin Behavioral Health, Friends of the Children and Citizens for Safe Schools.

“The Klamath Promise brings all these different sectors of our community together to work toward the goal of 100 percent graduation,” Hiller Clark said. “We’re able to, as a group, address most aspects of a student’s life in one way or another. It’s not just academics.”

For the future the Klamath Promise is planning on celebrating the successes so far. It’s working on a community-wide event to honor the graduates who worked so hard for the strong numbers the schools and districts are seeing.

“We’re not where we want to be. We’re pleased with the numbers. We’re glad to see the numbers are up,” Hiller Clark said. “We want to keep working to get where we want to be. We want all students to come out of high school with not just a degree, but we want them to have a plan for what they’re going to do next.”