She knew the school had issues, but William Fleming High School principal Susan Lawyer Willis didn't fully comprehend all of them when she took the job last summer.

It didn't take her long to discover this startling fact: A ninth-grader at Roanoke's Fleming High has about a 1-in-2 chance of earning a standard or advanced diploma.

The situation isn't much different at Patrick Henry High School.

As Willis and her counterpart at Patrick Henry prepare to hand diplomas to more than 500 graduates at ceremonies Thursday, Willis knows getting more kids to cross that stage is something she can't solve alone.

"It's bigger than a William Fleming problem. It's bigger than a high school problem," Willis said. "It becomes a systemic problem."

Of the 550 ninth-graders who started at Fleming in September, Willis said, 100 were a year or more older than their classmates. Two hundred had not passed their eighth-grade math and reading Standards of Learning tests.

Overage, behind and lacking confidence, these students are prime candidates for quitting school or, at best, earning a General Educational Development certificate.

The two city high schools continue to turn out hundreds of diploma-earning and college-bound graduates annually, yet 400 to 600 students -- or nearly half of every group of ninth-graders -- don't finish school with their classmates four years later, and many don't finish at all.

If every student stayed in school in Roanoke, the city would need a third high school, Superintendent Marvin Thompson said.

Under one method of counting, 77 percent of students who started ninth grade four years earlier finished high school in some fashion last year, including GEDs, program certificates and special diplomas, students with disabilities, and others.

Yet most of those documents don't count under a key yardstick: the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Under the act, by 2014 all students must graduate from high school with a standard or advanced diploma. Students due to finish school that year start the fifth grade this fall.

Calculated as required by NCLB, Roanoke's graduation rate last year was 58 percent, compared with the statewide mark of 80 percent.

The city has a long way to go, and it's been moving in the wrong direction.

The percentage of students who receive standard and advanced studies diplomas has declined steadily over the past nine years. In 1997, 97 percent of all Roanoke students who finished high school received standard or advanced diplomas. Last year, the number dipped to 74 percent.

At the same time, the percentage of students earning GEDs increased.

The dropout rate has decreased steadily, yet more than 200 students still quit city schools each year.

"I don't care which number we take," said School Board Chairwoman Kathy Stockburger, "it's too many students leaving education."

"Given the fact that our children are the most vulnerable children in the area," said board member Courtney Penn, "those numbers have an increased sense of seriousness to me."

School officials say the problem is in part the result of growing numbers of city students who live in poverty, and who locally and nationally struggle academically more often than their wealthier peers.

Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 700 overage students in city schools this year are poor, according to city schools data. About half have been in multiple schools recently, making them more likely to have educational gaps because of the moves.

They are also the students most likely to drop out.

In January 2005, there were 1,262 ninth-graders in city schools, and almost one in four was overage, according to data from the school system. By the end of the year, 77 ninth-graders had dropped out -- the largest number in any grade that year.

"It's a culture that has made these numbers," said school board member Jason Bingham.

Breaking the pattern

Leslie Basham can't put her finger on the moment she made the decision to quit school more than a dozen years ago.

Now 28, with a brand new GED in hand and a plan to become a certified nursing assistant, Basham looks back on it as a slow drift from interest in school to a group of troublemaking friends, not one of whom finished school.

Falling behind and being overage only made school less appealing. Pregnant and shortsighted, she couldn't be bothered with talk of what dropping out would mean. Since then, life has been a string of lousy jobs at $6 or $7 an hour, she said.

Jaime Barker can see the trouble coming for those like Basham.

They begin to miss school more often. They start to say things such as "I'm just tired of school." They hide their age.

"They feel like a failure, and they aren't," said Barker, an eighth-grade math teacher at Addison Middle School and the city's teacher of the year.

Those students need help, but when is the right time to intervene?

The city school system has offered alternative education programs for troubled students for nearly 20 years.

"I think we have tried in some ways to remediate folks once they've made the decision to drop out rather than come in earlier with successful interventions," Stockburger said.

Penn perceives that the programs have functioned more as a place to house students who were behavioral problems.

"That's when I really lost interest in school, when I went to alternative ed," Basham said.

Every student there was on the wrong path, she said.

Soon after taking over as superintendent, Thompson launched a study of the situation with overage students and alternative education. A team is working to change those programs to temporary sidetracks that ultimately lead students back into their home schools.

The system currently has several alternative ed programs, including the Noel C. Taylor Learning Academy and Adolescent Uplift.

"I think what we have here is working, we're just going to have to refine it," said Hallie Carr, director of adult education and adjunct programs.

Ideally, Carr said, every student will enter an alternative program with an educational plan. That should reshape the programs into places where students have a purpose and a set of steps to complete to get back on track.

Related to that, the administration has already dramatically increased the number of support team meetings for at-risk students. The meetings happen on campus and include the student, a parent or guardian, the principal, a school intervention specialist and sometimes someone from the community who knows the student, such as a pastor or a caseworker.

At Fleming, Willis said, something as simple as six absences in one class triggers a support team meeting.

The 2,171 meetings through spring this year in the city is more than double the number held in all of the 2003-04 school year.

In the past, administrators have relied more on home visits to intervene with at-risk students, said Truancy Coordinator Steve Tomasik.

The support team meetings are more effective, Tomasik said, because they surround the student with adults who care about and have expectations for the student. It also creates a kind of unwritten contract for the student and the adults to each do a part.

The school system has doubled the number of high school intervention specialists from two to four in recent years and made them 12-month employees.

"Once we begin to break the pattern," Stockburger said, "we'll have fewer students who need this kind of intervention."

Barker, the teacher of the year, works extra hours in one of the system's newer alternative programs, Adolescent Uplift. It targets overage middle-schoolers and uses small classes in core subject areas to get them back to their appropriate grade level in time to start high school.

"They want to learn, and you can see when they get it," she said.

Last year, 71 students went through the program. Thirty-six moved on to ninth grade in their home school this year, and 23 of them passed four or more classes their first semester. Nine of the original 71 dropped out of school.

The program catches the students at the right time, Barker believes, because it gets them back on track for a fresh start in high school.

Ultimately, however, school officials want to reduce the need for programs like these by keeping students on track all along.

That requires cultural change not only within schools, they say, but in the community, too.

'We want you to succeed'

"To me the issue is to keep children on grade track, doing whatever is necessary," said Penn, the board member.

"Holding back a kid should be a last resort," said Bingham, another board member. "We've got to say, 'We want you to succeed.' "

Sharon Richardson, executive director for student support services, believes the system's ongoing efforts to improve instruction and performance on Standards of Learning tests will naturally lead to more students earning promotion and fewer overage students.

Policy changes can help, too. Willis, the Fleming principal, found many students were thrown off track by a policy that required them to repeat a first semester class if they failed it before moving on to the second semester. Now, students can continue the class with the chance to make good enough grades the second semester to pass the entire course and take the appropriate SOL test on time.

Willis also found that 200 of this year's Fleming freshmen failed their eighth-grade math and reading SOL tests, so she started remedial courses to catch them up in those core subjects.

But Penn says programs can only go so far in fixing the problem.

"At the end of the day," he said, "we're still going to need to be dealing with students who are dealing with real-life issues ... which make school seem less important."

Indeed, many students are retained in a grade for issues other than academics. Some have attendance problems, while others fall behind because of suspensions or expulsions.

Stockburger believes the root of the issue is in how education is valued in the community.

The 2000 census found that one of four city residents over 25 years old is a dropout.

"The value of a diploma is not there in our city's culture," Stockburger said. "We have not in some way connected the value of graduating from high school with these students or perhaps with their families."

She believes the expectation of earning a high school diploma should begin to be instilled in preschool.

Stockburger and others sense that currently, many students and their families see a GED as equal to a diploma.

"I hear it all the time," said William Fleming High School PTSA President Cathy Crews, 'I'll just go get my GED.' "

The GED has become the refuge of struggling students.

Since 1999, more than 500 people under 18 have gone through Total Action Against Poverty's Project Recovery program for dropouts. While many were returned to public school, most opted to pursue a GED, said TAP's Tara Sheets.

That's good and bad, Penn said.

"The superintendent believes that dropout prevention by GED is in essence a negative," he said.

But Penn believes the growing number of GEDs counted in the system's graduation rate could be a reflection of effectively preventing more kids from dropping out. At the same time, educators are trying to change the "quick fix" mind-set that makes the GED an acceptable option.

Stockburger believes the system is moving in the right direction to reduce dropouts and improve the graduation rate.

"I'm not naive enough to think we're going to bring every child across that stage at both high schools," she said, but things will get better.

People must see the value of a diploma as a path to a better job and a better life, or they won't pursue it, Penn said.

"I want to believe that if we had opportunities, folks would go there, folks would stay in school," he said. "Without hope, people will not try."