In 2020 Powell students faced COVID-19 and the school closures and quarantine requirements that came with it.

During the pandemic “kids started dropping out at an alarming rate,” Park County School District 1 Superintendent Jay Curtis said. 

Last year, Powell had a graduation rate of 88.9% for the 2022-2023 academic school year as a district, as most of the students who finished their freshman year’s learning from home finished their high school careers.

That’s lower than last years 93.3% but still 7.5% above the state average. Powell High School had a graduation rate of 88.8% and Shoshone Learning Center a 90.9%.

The lower graduation rate is a “lagging indicator” from Covid years, Curtis said. But it is not expected to be the start of a trend.

“I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t just extremely disappointed that we weren’t able to get more of those kids back in the door,” Curtis said. “And all I can say is that we are working like crazy to make sure that this isn’t something that we are dealing with in the long term.”

In 2022-2023 the high school had a graduating class of 160 students and the SLC had 11 students. In 2021-2022 it had 126 students and the SLC had nine — that year the latter school boasted a graduation rate of 100%.

During the pandemic, students exposed to the illness were initially required to stay home for 10 days, eventually they could choose to wear a mask to school or stay at home. Some students who would make the choice to have an at home quarantine would fall behind, Curtis said, even though classroom materials were available on Canvas.

“And should we have done something different? Could we have done something different? I don’t know,” Curtis said. “But it wasn’t when Covid started that was happening. It was when we came back to school the next couple years and we’re doing quarantines that kids were really affected by Covid itself.”

PHS Principal Tim Wormald agreed that the pandemic may have played a role in the 4% drop in Powell’s graduation rates.

“I think one of the things that we’re still trying to figure out a little bit is during that time, some kids developed some poor attendance habits,” Wormald said. “And some of it’s our fault, we had to quarantine students and forced their hand to stay home. Of course, if they were sick, we didn’t want them here, and so I think, in some cases, that made it hard for some students to get back in the habit of attending school regularly.”

From 2020-2022 Powell has seen graduation rates in the low to mid 90s.

“When we saw students dropping out at an alarming rate during Covid, we knew this would be coming. We’ve been working feverishly to try and get kids back in the door,” Curtis said. “We’ve done that with a few of them. Some of them have not (returned to school.) But I do not expect this to be something that we see as a continuing trend. Next year, I fully expect our graduation rate to bounce back upward to where we’re used to it being.”

Because of the way the cohorts are calculated some students in Powell who transferred to a homeschool or students who dropped out and later returned to school were still counted as not completing.

If the students who transitioned to homeschooling were removed from the cohort, Powell’s graduation rate becomes 91%, Wormald said. If the students who returned to school and graduated were counted in the statistics, Powell High’s graduation rate would then be 92.3%.

“I do think it’s significant to know that of the students that are counting as non-graduates for us, two of them have already earned their diplomas since last spring,” Womald said.

He added that students who graduated within five years had a graduation of 93.6% and students who graduated within six years had a graduation rate of 94.4%

“Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, but when those students graduate, they get counted as part of a four or a five or a six year cohort, we’re pretty proud of those numbers, for sure,” Wormald said. 

Following the Covid pandemic, PCSD1 has added additional student supports — it increased the amount of school counselor positions and added a student success coordinator at Powell High as well as a district wide social worker.

“We have a lot of great people working really hard for for kids and our teachers, it seems like (they) bend over backwards to help kids be successful and work super hard to help them, and then we have really great support staff like Jason Quigley, and Amber Beaudry has been working really hard this year with helping us coordinate all of our interventions. It takes a lot of people but we’re all working very hard to help these kids earn their diploma,” Wormald said. 

Elsewhere in the state Sheridan County School District 2 had a graduation rate of 90.2% and Park County School District 6 (Cody) had a graduation rate of 82.9%. Park County School District 16 (Meeteetse) had a graduation rate of 100% alongside Sheridan County School District 3 (Clearmont). Both of these schools had a graduating class of under 10 students each. 

The state’s average graduation rate for the 2022-2023 school year was 81.4%

A release from the Wyoming Department of education said from a statistical standpoint the state’s graduation rate has stayed above 80% since 2015-2016 — 284 more students graduated this academic year than the year before.