HUDSON – Hudson High School’s four-year graduation rate fell in 2021, landing below the state average, Principal Jason Medeiros said at a Hudson School Committee meeting on March 22.
This also left Hudson with the lowest graduation rate of the eight public high schools in the Community Advocate coverage area, at 84.5%.
Medeiros noted that Hudson’s 2021 graduation rate is, indeed, lower than the state average while the dropout rate is higher. He added, however, that rates are comparable to municipalities like Marlborough and Waltham which, like Hudson, have increasing amounts of high needs students.
Marlborough’s graduation rate was slightly higher than Hudson’s at 87.2% in 2021.
Waltham’s was lower, at 83.1%, according to Department of Elementary and Secondary Education data.
Grafton’s rate was 93.6%, while the remaining five schools in Marlborough, Shrewsbury, Northborough and Westborough all saw rates between 97% and 98.6%.
Last year was only the second time in the last five years that Hudson had a lower graduation rate than Marlborough, which has otherwise had the lowest such rate in the region.
Hudson and Marlborough were, likewise, the only schools in the region below the state average graduation rate of 89.8% in 2021.
Principal notes ‘positive and upward trend’
Medeiros noted that, while Hudson’s graduation rate decreased in 2021 compared to the previous year, it is still on an upward trend over a five-year period.
“Despite last year’s hiccups, I still feel that there is a positive and upward trend on not only the aggregate numbers, but the subgroups,” Medeiros said.
Medeiros presented additional data focusing on four-year students who had been at Hudson High School since ninth grade. While Hudson’s graduation rate for all students was 84.5% in 2021, it was 93.5% for those four-year students.
This still represented a decline from the previous year’s rate of 95% for four-year students. However, the dip was not as sharp as the decline in total graduation rate from 91.4% in 2020 to 84.5% in 2021.
“It tells us that at least for this cohort, students in the class of 2021 who started ninth grade with us graduated at a significantly higher rate than those who transferred here,” Medeiros said.
Medeiros said that Hudson High School should continue to develop and build its Guiding Hawk peer mentor program, in which students new to both the country and school are mentored and guided by students who speak their same family language.
He added that Hudson High School should also design more programs and courses for students at risk of dropping out while working to increase social and emotional learning supports.
Reviewing the data, Medeiros said that of the 30 students in the Class of 2021 who transferred to Hudson, 22 are economically disadvantaged and 16 are English learner students.
Of those 30 students, 13 graduated last year, 11 dropped out and six are still currently enrolled.
Of the 11 transfer students who dropped out, all are economically disadvantaged and seven were English learner students.
Medeiros continued, saying that some of the economically disadvantaged students who dropped out had to work full time to support their families as the primary earner after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We tried supporting some of those students, flexing them to fully online curriculum,” Medeiros said. “Most of the students struggled to do that, only a couple of them were able to weather that storm through the home stretch.”
Additional reporting by Dakota Antelman
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