Dropping out can be described as leaving school with no high school diploma. Equivalent credentials to a high school diploma could be a certificate of General Educational Development, as stated by the National Centre for Education statistics. Young people who do not finish school by earning the required certificates encounter a lot of problems in life compared those who graduate. They are more likely to live in poverty, face unemployment problems and join bad groups if they drop out of school and become idle. The government has made an effort and demanded that families, communities and schools take firm steps to retain students in school, but these dropouts remain. It is estimated in America that every twenty nine seconds a teenager pulls out of school. This result to over one million dropouts a year or seven thousand on a daily basis.
Socioeconomic background
There are factors that contribute to these rampant pull outs from school and some of them are: socioeconomic background, where students who come from low-income families easily give up on school compared to those from middle-income and high-income families. Students from poor families face a lot of problems including lack of school fees, lack of enough pocket money, lack of proper dressing and even lack of food. For a student to comfortably stay in class, they need to be emotionally stable. These problems make students psychologically impaired, and if they are not stable enough to withstand the pressure, they finally pull out of school.
Disabilities
The second factor is Disabilities. Students with disabilities have high chances of living school. It is estimated by the National Transition Study that 36.4 per cent of teenagers drops out of school due to disability. Students who are impaired in a way find it hard to be in class because they face a lot of challenges. You find that some of them have problems with walking. Moving around the school compound becomes challenging to them, and in the event they get tired, they end up dropping out of school. The psychological torture of not being like other students may also force the disabled students to completely cut off from school.
Academic factors
Another contributor to teenage drop outs comes from academic factors. It was indicated by the National search that there are students who are generally weak. They do their best, but they keep receiving poor grades. This group also include those students who are overage and repeat a grade. With time their self-esteem is lowered, and they finally lose hope with their studies. This group of students easily drop out of school contributing to the thirty percent teenage drop out from high school.
Absenteeism
Poor’s attendance of students for no good reasons can lead to school dropout. Students who avoid school for no good reasons miss a lot that is taught in class and eventually end up performing poorly. Absenteeism may also lead to discipline cases such as suspensions or expulsions from school. These factors may result to a student dropping out of school. Other factors may include students joining bad companies and peer pressure. Teenagers engaging in acts such as drugs and premarital sex affect their concentration in school. They finally drop out of school joining bad gangs.
CONCLUSION
Controlling the rate of teenage drop out from high school has been a great challenge to the parents and the government. My opinion is that one of the ways this problem could be solved is by making these drop outs usefully to the community. This can be achieved by coming up with other institutions to train them so that they have a good place in the society again.
