Columbia Falls grad coach looks to help students get degree

Columbia Falls High School now has a graduation coach to help students who need it get through high school. Leslie Fant has been working in the new position at the high school since the beginning of the year. She teaches a credit recovery class and a learning strategies and support class.

Students need 23 credits to graduate and each semester class is a half-credit, she explained. Where most students struggle to keep up is in English, Fant said. English is required for all four years of high school, a credit a year, so if a student falls behind, they’re doubling up on English. For example, a student who fails freshmen English would have to take two sections to make up the loss as a sophomore.

In addition to English, students need three years of math, two sciences, a vocational art, a fine art, a year of foreign language and American history and government and two years of physical education.

It amounts to just under six credits a year, or six classes per day, but freshmen generally have to take eight classes a day to meet the requirements, and that’s where the trouble starts for most students.

For freshman Cade Aubrey, the program has been a big help.

“I’m not very organized,” he said. “In a regular study hall, you don’t have a teacher over your shoulder helping you keep track of everything.”

But in Fant’s class, he does.

Nancy Smith, another freshman, agreed.

“In here it’s really structured and I get help when I need it,” she said.

All told, Fant said her caseload is about 55 students. There have been challenges in the first year. The biggest is attendance. Fant said the school attendance policy allows a student to be absent if their parents call them in sick. But some students have been “sick” upwards of 25 days already this year — that’s five weeks of school. Fant taught physical education in Georgia for 10 years and in that state, students weren’t excused as sick unless they had a note from a doctor. Without a note, it was an unexcused absence. A student with 10 or more unexcused absences was expelled from that school and would have to go somewhere else.

Fant’s an advocate for a tougher attendance policy. 

The program is evolving. There’s an active effort to identify at-risk students in junior high and Fant is trying to foster better communication between her office and teachers so students who are struggling can be identified sooner.

For Aubrey and Smith, the program has been a great help.

They both said they’ve gone from Fs and Ds to Cs and Bs.

The goal is to increase the school’s graduation rate. Last year it was about 80 percent, a full six percent lower than the state average. To bump that number up, the school needs to graduate about 60 more students annually.

“You just have to chip away a little at a time,” Fant noted.