Fulton Youth Commission Supports Raising Ga. Drop-Out Age
When you think of youth leadership groups, maybe you imagine things like community service projects. But one metro Atlanta group is doing more: actively supporting a move to raise the state’s drop-out age to 17.
A few years ago, a friend of Bailey Damiani’s dropped out of high school. A year later, he told her he regretted it.
“He wished that someone had been there to kind of encourage him to continue on pursuing his academic career,” she says, “because his quality of life now is so below the potential that he could have had.”
Now Damiani is 17, a senior at Grady High School, and the chair of the legislative committee of the Fulton County Youth Commission — which formally supports raising Georgia’s drop-out age from 16 to 17, or even 18.
“When we look to neighboring states such as Tennessee and South Carolina, whose dropout age is 17, we see that their graduation rates are almost 10-15 percent higher than the Georgia graduation rate,” Damiani says.
She also cites the higher wages and lower incarceration rates of high school grads.
But there’s strong opposition in the state legislature to any measure that would raise the age from 16. Republican state Sen. Fran Millar says raising the drop-out age is too costly, and only serves to retain disruptive students.
Members of the Fulton County Youth Commission say they’ll spend the months ahead of the spring lawmaking session investigating solutions to these problems.
That’s when lawmakers say they plan to re-introduce a measure to raise the drop-out age.
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