Since the graduating class of 2004, every student who attended the Warwick Area Career & Technical Center crossed the stage with a high-school diploma in hand.

A dropout rate to envy.

Well, there was one failure. The center’s recently retired director, Joseph Crowley, winces as he recalls the one kid who wouldn’t finish his senior project, for reasons Crowley refused to go into.

Students at Warwick’s C & T Center come from five high schools, in three school districts. After spending half the day at their home school working on core curriculum — English, math — they’re bused to the center. Most likely the problem with that one dropout was with his home high school. According to national surveys and those administered annually in Rhode Island, career-and-tech students tend to adore their career centers and be far less enthusiastic about the home high school.

Learning practical, vocational skills engages students.

As we tour the building, Crowley crows like a rooster about “his” kids’ accomplishments. He rattles off the names of winners in information technology, culinary arts, and the architecture and drafting program. Medals and trophies abound from national competitions. Over the scream of tools in the auto shop, Crowley bellows that Warwick’s C & T was named the number-one auto tech program in the country in 2004. And in 2005, it had the number-one auto tech student.

In the fashion merchandising class, two seniors, Misty and Shannon, are deep into creating an eco-friendly line of clothes, easy on the environment and pocketbook alike. The scope of this project has grown way beyond the requirements of the class, to become their state-required graduation project. Together they’ve researched organic fabrics and natural fibers that wash well without chemicals. Misty, the principal designer, has been sketching out the line. She’ll make one complete outfit. As the principal marketer, Shannon will include Misty’s outfit in her fashion show — “trends of the season.” She explains, “I’m really organized.” Both say they love the work and are relieved to have their graduation project under control.

Many Warwick C & T students complete their senior projects at the center, because that’s where their passions lie. In general, Career and Technical Education (CTE) holds onto students through graduation. They finish.

Nationally, about one-third of high school students drop out. The district of Warwick itself has a 66 percent graduation rate. Ten percent of the students take more than four years to graduate, which is fine. But even 76 percent is not a sterling record.

Furthermore, C & T students are not the easiest group of kids. In Warwick, about 40 percent are special-needs students, while the district average is 21 percent. Still, Crowley reports that his students gain, on average, far more than a year’s learning each year. Students want to master demanding technical manuals. They want, for example, a CISCO computer-networking certificate, or to win a spot in the union-sponsored electricians program. The goals are concrete and lead to specific jobs.

And engaged kids have fewer discipline problems. The current director, Bill McCaffrey, got a warm smile and wave from a student who was a regular problem just last year, when McCaffrey had been vice principal at his home high school. There he “made a lot of poor choices. He’s a different kid when he’s here.”

McCaffrey says, “We have no acceptable casualties. We expect the kids to perform and we’ve always had authentic assessments,” meaning that the kid either baked the pie, wired the doorbell properly, fixed the computer, or not. It’s not abstract. You can see it, taste it, or boot it up.

But if it’s that good — according to the data, students and the administrators — why is this school slightly under-enrolled?

Two problems dog the attractiveness of Warwick C & T.

First, vocational education everywhere is having a hard time shaking the stigma of being for “the dumb kids.” And parents in particular cling to the persistent belief that vocational education and preparing for college are mutually exclusive. Parents want their children to go to college. Currently there’s a big national debate about the value of trying to get all kids into four-year colleges, given the expense and crushing debt students often have to take on. Some states have worked hard to convince parents that skilled labor makes good, reliable money. But mostly, voke-ed is still a hard sell.

Locally and elsewhere, however, old-fashioned, half-day C & T Centers like Warwick’s suffer from special disincentives. Vocational education always costs more than regular academics. An auto-body shop, construction site or industrial kitchen are expensive, and need maintenance and periodic upgrades to new industry standards. The classes are smaller, for reasons of health and safety. Students can’t be under-supervised in an electricity lab or a machine shop.

So when vocational education is separate from the students’ core academic home, it is a separate budget item. Especially in times like these, districts don’t want to spend the extra money it takes to educate a C & T student. Not even to lower its drop-out rate. Not even to graduate the antisocial and special-needs kids traditionally unsuccessful at regular schools.

I don’t blame the districts, exactly, since they’re starving. And the state is drowning in troubles.

But state officials should make more of the assets we do have. Career and technical education reliably produces high-school graduates and skilled workers. And we badly need more.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.