I went to this high school (sans very old cars but close to realistic unfortunately) and my entering class was 1424 freshmen. I'm reminded of this number because we have a large reunion coming up this fall and of the 619 who graduated, we have a mailing list of nearly 400. Too much information? We graduated 43.46% of those who started. We also had a college acceptance rate of about 60% which in the 60s was a huge number. The legal "I wanna quit school age" was 16 so we lost most of our folks after 2 years of high school.
I also bring this up because there is a huge argument going on about the school budget in our community and the fact that 10% or so of the kids who enter high school don't make it through. My high school was actually 8 times bigger than this local high school. The local kids take 7 x's 38 minute classes a day. We took 5 x's 1 hour and you had to have grades to take a 6th or 7th class. We didn't have calculators. They didn't exist. We took 6 years worth of English and 6 years worth of social studies and a mandatory 3 years of a foreign language. We had one honors english and one honors math class per graduating class. You made it as a freshman or you didn't. No AP (advance placement - college credit).
I'll be the first to admit that my high school was far from perfect. If you were an under achiever, things were tough. If you wanted to learn, however, and put forth the effort they would positively move heaven and earth to help you. Now we just seem to want to show good graduation rates and kids with college credits. One local valdadictorian will enter Williams as a sophomore for instance - it made the papers.
It wouldn't be a bad idea, when confronted by class reunions, to examine what you went through and how it was with today's product. It is extremely doubtful that we are doing a better job in spite of the numbers.
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