In 2017, Centennial High Schools graduation rate grew and increased to 84.33%, despite the 11 snow days.

Mairi Scott-Aguirre, Principal, talked about how there is a slight increase from 82.93% to 84.33% between the graduations in 2016 and 2017.

This trend seems to be more realistic of it continuing to go up because when it goes up dramatically one year, it will decrease dramatically the next year for whatever reason it may be, she said.

Scott-Aguirre said, “There were gains in every category of the Cohort Graduation Rate except for Hispanic/Latino,” and she also said it will be looked at to see what happened and why.

Scott-Aguirre explained that while scrambling to get the seniors ready for graduation, the students, teachers, counselors, coaches, and other staff did their best to support them and get them ready for graduation.

The process of making Freshman Success better is potentially going to help even more because it will help students get on track even earlier than waiting until their junior year when it is too late, she said.

Scott-Aguirre, along with some other staff, go to the University of Chicago to research more and see how the public schools run their own form of Freshman Success to get more ideas to make it more successful for Centennial students as well and to grow the program.

“There are four- Anne Haverkamp, Deena Currie, Ehren Schneider- of us going to Chicago to see how to help. Mostly for the Freshman on track program,” Scott-Aguirre explained along with talking about how to figure out what factors contribute to bad attendance and grades.

There are experimental teams that go along with Freshman Success which is used to help figure out how to make the class better for the incoming students that will be in the class.

“I still think the graduation rate is a good show for the school,” said Scott-Aguirre.