Last year, all the graduating seniors were accepted to college. The center also has reduced the attrition rate from 15 percent to 8 percent, Kennedy said. We have the same expectations. Some students just need a little more help than others. So we throw out some ropes to help them swim.
Some ropes are just a little longer than others.
It was the high attrition among students with disabilities and concerns from parents that alerted Maher. Because it is a private school, St. Michael s does not receive federal dollars for special programs that public schools do. And while faculty and parents were concerned, they wanted to maintain the school s high academic standards. Maher, who did graduate work in special education and was a diagnostician in Houston, had moved to Austin four years earlier and was working at Southwest Texas State University. She had taught in Catholic schools in Houston, but left because there were no programs in place to help students with learning disabilities.