Administrators with positive regard for staff, students, and parents are essential to a safe and responsive environment, as are teachers whose interactions are sensitive to students' and parents' characteristics. Staff, students, and parents working together can explore and celebrate their diversity. Peer tutoring, and perhaps even more, older students' tutoring and mentoring younger students or pupils in the elementary grades, have increased school persistence and achievement of the tutors as much as the tutees. Also student training for and participation in peer-mediated conflict resolution teams have reduced suspensions. School accommodation to outside factors that can cause students to drop out is essential.
Counselors can help students marshall their own and outside resources.
Home outreach can mobilize parents' support for their children's attendance and achievement, as well as throw light on the students' behavior in school. Outreach by school staff, especially teachers and counselors, may demonstrate to alienated parents the school's commitment to their children and promote the parents' valuing of education. Flexible scheduling and programs outside the regular school hours and months have made it possible for students to combine work and family responsibilities with persisting in school. At the same time, any one of these emphases might provide the leading edge of a program, or a rallying point that gives a program its identity, if the program is actively guided by school completion goals, which staff must regularly monitor. Effective programs require versatile student record systems to keep track of individual students, to profile how different groups of students are faring, and to transfer records from one school and school system to another.