24 Ways to Improve Your Graduation Rate

Vicki Davis (00:00): Do you have 9th graders who are already slipping and you worry they won’t make it to graduation day? And who do struggling freshmen at this school listen to, even more than their teachers? Today we’re talking about how to raise your graduation rate by catching struggling students early.

This is Thought Leader Thursday, Episode 1024.

Announcer (00:22): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:26): Today, we’re talking with Cara Vienna, 2026 NASSP National High School Assistant Principal of the Year finalist from Los Alamitos High School in California. Under Cara’s leadership, her school has achieved a 100% graduation rate for two consecutive years with over 3,000 students enrolled. Cara oversees counseling, special education, college and career, math, mental health, and intervention.

So if you’ve ever wondered what it actually takes to get a graduation rate to 100%, this is the conversation.

How did one high school reach a 100% graduation rate with more than 3,000 students?

Vicki Davis (01:06): Cara, congratulations. So a 100% graduation rate at a school with over 3,000 students is extraordinary. So would you take us behind the numbers?

What is the system look like that makes that possible?

Cara Vienna (01:19): Well, 100 percent, not just my direction, but in with my administrative team, we have been together for five years with a few coming and going. [#1] So I think we spent a ton of time initially just building climate and culture. So really just working with our families, our students and our teachers on just building community and building within our systems.

For example, for me, working with my counseling team was really just getting to know the counselors, what are their processes, what are things that are really working. And if you look at anything historically with Los Alamitos, things have been working really well for a very long time. We have an amazing community.

We’re a small community. We have six elementary, two middle, and one high school. So I really do credit a lot of where we are at and how well our students do.

[#2] With all of those factors. Because truly, when you have a one high school district, you really can work with those students early on and follow and support them and provide various different interventions along the way. So by the time they all come to one school, which is Los Al High, and we are Griffins because our Eagles and our Lions, which are two middle school mascots together, form a Griffin.

That has a lot to do with how we get the students ready when they arrive here at the high school. And so within our five years, like I said, we really did work on building our community and our culture and to be really honest. We looked at our graduation rates when we came in and they were already super high, the high 90s for many, many years.

So it was just about really finding ways to identify those students early on and provide as many interventions as we can along the way up until their senior year. I can go on and on and on about the various different things that we added.

How can a high school spot struggling ninth graders before they fall behind?

Vicki Davis (03:18): You have a student, ninth grade, and they’re struggling. What does it look like when you identify a student?

Cara Vienna (03:24): One of the things that we started is we have [#3] we don’t have an alternative ed program. So all of our students graduate from here or they end up at a different program, which not a whole lot end up in another program. So when those students come in, we have real-time remediation.

It’s called our skills lab. We have an A through G side and then a graduation diploma side. And it’s strictly identifying from the middle schools, which of our students are coming in without, you know, those learning readiness skills.

Those study skills, those executive functioning skills. [#4] And once we identify those students, we have a 9/10 skills lab, which is like an elective, and those students are put into that class. And that class is.

Designed to teach them those readiness skills, right? How to study for a test, how to organize your systems, how to send an email to a teacher to get help. They are placed into those classes.

They’re small or no more than 20 students.

How do peer mentoring programs help struggling high school students?

Cara Vienna (04:28): [#5] And we also added a mentor program. So we have instead of TAs. We identify 11th and 12th graders that are high performing students that love helping other students.

So those students are placed in those skills classes, and then they’re mentored with three to four ninth or 10th graders, and they build that person on campus. That is their go-to, their support, has those good habits. So we started that program in the five years that we’ve been here.

And we now have over 85 student mentors. That serve other students [#6] and so now they’re pushing into academic courses. We have mentors in our language classes, our science classes, our English classes.

And we all know that students learn from their peers. They’re much more receptive than they are often from teachers when they’re struggling. That has been really instrumental in identifying those early students and then providing them those supports early on.

How often should teachers check D/F lists, and what happens after a student is flagged?

Cara Vienna (05:31): [#7] Every semester and every six to 12 weeks, we run D/F lists and we see how those kids are doing and we start providing interventions for those students early on. So that students, by the time they get through their ninth grade year. They have been intentionally provided with resources of how to get those supports, [#8] as well as holding our SST meetings, holding meetings with our counselors and our families early on [#9] you know, we have a Griffin Lab, which is free tutoring, where we have teachers that come and provide supports in our remediation classes.

We started with, it was like one department would be, if they had extra room in their schedule. [#10] They would be running those skills labs. We recognize that this is something that every department should understand what it’s like to work with students that, you know, need that additional support.

So we got teachers from every content area. So we have a few from science, a few from math, a few from English that are running the intervention labs and the skills labs. And then in 11th and 12th grade.

It becomes remediation, sometimes 10th grade as well. [#11] So those students are getting real-time remediation in their school day. So they don’t have to leave the campus.

They still get to be a part of Los Al. They still get to be a part of all the activities and we all know that connectivity is so important for student success. So that allowed our Griffins to stay here and get that support in real time.

Why do students slip through the cracks and not graduate?

Vicki Davis (07:06): When you talk to your friends at other districts, what do you think some of the most common reasons that students kind of slip through the cracks and don’t graduate?

Cara Vienna (07:15): I definitely think it comes from the home environment. And the partnership with the home environment Post-COVID, we’ve seen such a rise in mental health. And so I really do think.

And we have definitely seen the pendulum swing in that direction where students, the anxiety levels, and it’s not. Just students’ mental health family’s mental health. It’s the condition of our parents and the resources they have.

I mean, we’re very fortunate in Los Alamitos that you know, demographics allow us to have a ton of resources. And I think in other areas, they don’t always have the ability to. You know, access all the supports that are available.

And so they’re barely making it in their own life. And so being able to support their children, we have families that come from other countries and all those different factors. It really is about coming together with the family and the school team to say, hey, look, we’re your family when you’re here at school.

And so we’re going to build that bridge and find every creative way to get you here. [#12] You know, whether that be we add busing, whether that be a ride share of a student that can do a carpool with you. So it’s looking at creative ways to get them here and then once we have them here, it’s doing what we can to check in on them.

[#13] Helping them find an adult on campus that is their go-to. That is huge for our students. You know, we did a [#14] ton of work with Challenge Success, which is a partnership with Stanford, really looking at three prongs, right?

Well-being, engagement, and belonging. And we did tons of survey work around how are we doing? How are our teachers doing in those three areas?

How are our families doing and how are our students doing? So [#15] it’s about the relationship and really being transparent about what we’re going to need to get there and getting families to trust us when we come up with these creative plans that are out of the box thinking. We’ve seen that this historically has worked.

So trust us. And let’s just try you plan A, plan B, plan C, and really just do what we can to support our families.

What do high school counselors do to help every student graduate?

Vicki Davis (09:33): So what role does the counseling department play that most people outside education might not fully appreciate?

Cara Vienna (09:41): Our counselors are credentialed PPS counselors. So we’re very fortunate. And they carry large caseloads of over 500 students each.

We have six counselors, five and a half, really. It’s a lot. So I think it’s about using.

The various different layers of intervention like the tiers of support. [#16] Every counselor we have, they make sure they check in with their seniors and their freshmen right at the beginning of the year. So just systems to ensure that we have checkpoints.

[#17] We also started a wellness program where we have a full-time wellness counselor and a Well Space. So that has been another area where we could check in. Again, students can use that space and we have data that we can pull from why they’re there.

So there’s multiple layers of teachers, counselors, administration, interns, checking in on students when we know that they’re working through something. And then we just kind of. All surround these students and together network to provide supports for our students.

Our counselors are involved in everything. [#18] They do meet with every single student during registration. Imagine that.

We’re in it right now. 11th grade counseling, they just did their big presentation, and now they will meet with every single 11th grader one-to-one to do their four-year plan and to talk about where you’re at and what are we doing for colleges. [#19] 11th grade teachers are starting to do college essays with kids. So it’s just everybody kind of has a piece of developing that one child and making sure that they’re being checked on by various different groups.

What is a Well Space in a high school, and who designs it?

Vicki Davis (11:19): Wow. What does a Well Space look like?

Cara Vienna (11:22): We’re really fortunate. Our Well Space used to be a child development center. So it already was a pretty large classroom with two bathrooms, independent stalls, which is great for a high school.

And we had a partnership with LAEF, our organization, and our nonprofit organization, as well as the county, as well as the big hospital. And with that partnership. We designed this beautiful Well Space, the coloring, the design, everything is designed like a college.

Like a student center. And then what we did when we started our Well Space is [#20] we had a student committee that actually met with the design team and they created what do you want the space to look like? What do you want to name this space?

What are some of the topics that you want us to concentrate and do like initiatives throughout the year? What are the areas of concern that are not being identified that we need. To do various different speaker series?

And we had a partnership with a family that [#21] donated and we were able to do an outside Well Space. So we have the inside space is called the Loft and the outside space is called the Oasis. And that was all designed by students here at Los Al.

How can schools use student, staff and family surveys to make decisions?

Vicki Davis (12:40): Wow. What’s your approach to data-driven decision-making?

Cara Vienna (12:45): So we’re so fortunate, like I said, that we partner with Challenge Success. And part of that work is doing surveys, right, with your student population your parent population, your local community, as well as your teachers. That was a great entry point because that was like really serving the entire school.

And where are we in these areas, in those three-prong areas? That data, as well as our graduation, our APs, all of that is brought together. And so what.

We did is every time we did that survey data. [#22] We would bring the entire school together during a PD day, and we go over kind of what, where we see, what are the celebrations, right? There’s so many things to celebrate.

And that is so important for our school community is to start there, because it really does send the message that we’re doing a lot of things right. That is so important for our entire community. And then identifying what are those things that we were surprised about?

And what is our approach to now address that? [#23] And so many committees were forms. Our homework policy came out of that.

We were able to do [#24] our student shadow days where teachers and students were partnered together and did two full days of shadowing a student and then coming back and bringing all of that information back to the school. And what was that experience like? So again, it’s really using student voice and teacher voice to drive decision making through these committees.

And we changed our schedules around that. So just a lot of things are kind of derived from what we found from our data and then. Going back and continuing to do those surveys to see if there’s been growth with those changes.

Vicki Davis (14:31): So many exciting ideas here. And we’ve been talking to Cara Vienna. She is a 2026 NASSP National High School Assistant Principal of the Year finalist from Los Alamitos High School in California.

And Cara, thanks for coming on the show.

Cara Vienna (14:51): Thank you. It’s been great. I appreciate you spending time on this topic because it is so important for all of us and our future grads.

So thank you.

Vicki Davis (15:01): Thank you for tuning in to 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.