If you want to learn more about children with disabilities being dubbed “non-diploma bound,” which I wrote about today, here is a useful graph and a table that breaks down the numbers by grade and disability.
Here are some tidbits from the data, which were released in September:
- Twenty-six children have been identified as unlikely to get a diploma while they were in preschool. Most of them were diagnosed with mental retardation or autism.
- The largest group of students were first identified as “non-diploma bound” after 12th grade. Scholar Thomas Hehir says that could be a good thing because it means the decision to not seek a diploma wasn’t made too soon. Principals of schools for severely disabled students have indicated that some “non-diploma bound” students do seek their degrees later.
- Students with mental retardation were the largest group among “non-diploma bound” students, followed by students with learning disabilities, and then by students with autism.