For many students, dropping out of high school is not the end of the line, a new federal study suggests. Nearly 7 percent of 9th graders in 2009 became “stopouts"—they left school for at least one period of four weeks or more between grades 9 and 11, but were still enrolled in school in 2012, according to a data analysis by the National Center on Education Statistics. By contrast, only 2.7 percent of students who were freshmen in 2009 left school and still had not returned by 2012.
Students in the poorest 20 percent of families were more likely than other groups to both stop out or drop out, with 12.2 percent stopping out and 4.7 percent leaving permanently.
