Over 1,000 students have left this Indiana district to home-school. Can it solve its hidden dropout problem?

An under the radar crisis is happening at Indiana high schools, as thousands of students leave without diplomas. Many of those students have diminished opportunities for careers and further education. Yet they are left out of state grad rates.

It’s easy to assume that hidden dropouts are primarily a problem at schools that we already knew were struggling — even if we didn’t know how many of the students were leaving without diplomas. Our first story focused on two Indianapolis campuses that had been taken over by the state for academic problems.

But we looked further into the data on how many students were removed from the grad rate because they were categorized as leaving to home-school. Many of the places with exceptionally high numbers have consistently earned passing grades from the state.

At Muncie Central High School, for example, over 100 students in the class of 2018 were labeled as leaving to home-school, and the numbers have been high for years. Now, new district leaders say they are overhauling options for struggling teens and changing the withdrawal process as they try to keep students from leaving to home-school.

Read the full story of Muncie, the district with the largest number of students leaving for home-school from the class of 2018. 

That’s just one story we uncovered. But we know there are more. So we’re sharing the data with readers. Tell us what you find.

Check out our database of how many students left each Indiana high school. 

— Dylan Peers McCoy, reporter