Milton High, where half of the 1,700 students’ families qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — has since 2010 used extensive data collection on struggling students and hands-on individual counseling strategies to help students who are at risk of not graduating finish on time. Read more about those efforts here.

Emerson says the district works hard to apply that strategy across all schools.

“Finding out what each student needs is important,” Emerson says. “The student may not need more instruction, the student may need other types of support.

“I am proud of the work being done at each school to graduate every student that has the desire and capability to graduate,” he says. “I anticipate good news” for this year’s graduation rates.

Managing mobility

Norm Ross, assistant superintendent in Escambia County, says the district’s graduation rate will increase when the data is finalized.

The district’s graduation rate at 66.1 percent in 2014, is up 10 percentage points from a decade ago.

“We do anticipate a better percentage (for 2015),” Ross says. “That’s our responsibility to the community.

“It is a very complex situation,” Ross says. “There are a lot of data elements that have to be factored in.”

Such factors can include, Ross says, students who begin school in the district as freshmen but transfer out of district before their senior year. Another factor that must be double-checked when submitting graduation data to the state is the withdrawal code, the reason a student gives for withdrawing from school.

“Data clerks go back and check, and because of that due diligence, sometimes you find errors,” he says. “It may be only one or two or three or four, but it can make a difference. We’re a very mobile district.”

One way the state measures the mobility of students from school to school is the stability rate — the percentage of students who were in a school in October who are still at the same school the following February.

The district’s overall stability rate for 2014 was 94 percent, according to state data.

In 2016, Pine Forest High will be the second Escambia high school to track every student in a career academy. A cybersecurity career academy is sure to be the centerpiece of that effort.

The so-called “wall-to-wall” career academy concept was pioneered locally at West Florida High School. It opened in 2001 with all students tracked into one of 12 paths that combine academics with workforce skills and stress hands-on, real-world application of algebra, physics and other subjects.

West Florida is the only district high school to earn an A on the state standardized test-based grading system, a grade it has maintained since 2005.

Why it matters

If the teenager in question of finishing high school isn’t your teenager, why should the graduation rate matter to you?

Reggie Dogan has written about the findings of an Auburn University professor who researched the economic impact increasing Alabama’s high school graduation rate would have. The target rate in that analysis is 90 percent of high school students graduating on time.

The findings:

— Steady progress toward that goal of 90 percent would bring higher employment, earnings and tax revenue because of rising educational attainment.

— By 2020, if the goal is achieved, the state’s economic output would increase by $430 million as a result of more graduates, and revenues in the Education Trust Fund would grow by $22 million.

— Each subsequent graduating class would add nearly 1,200 direct jobs to Alabama’s economy. Every class with a 90 percent graduation rate would collectively earn $68 million more annually than a class with an 80 percent graduation rate.

Florida is not Alabama, but it is a good bet that the lack of educational attainment in our workforce at large is money we are missing out on.

Training workers is expensive for companies. So, naturally, they prefer a workforce that already largely meets the basic educational requirements of the modern world.

In many cases, that is gauged by the high school graduation rate — which in Escambia County would earn a D on a grading scale.

More widely implementing strategies that have been successful in other communities — in the two-county area and outside of it — is a key to improving that grade.

A better-educated workforce is more attractive to a new business that may move to a community, for sure. It is also more attractive to existing businesses that want to grow.

Seems like a worthwhile investment.