The pressures on inner-city teens are greater than ever, says Tolman High Principal Frederick Silva, who says the high number of dropouts at his school doesn’t reflect how great the kids there are, and how much they’ve overcome.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

Frederick Silva, the principal of Tolman High School in Pawtucket, took me down to the lower floor.

“This is the nursery,” he said.

In a high school?

“We have students who have babies,” Silva said. “This allows them to come to school.”

He called it the kind of creative program needed in an inner-city setting.

I paused on the phrase “inner city.” That’s not too strong a phrase to describe Tolman?

“Oh,” said Silva. “This is definitely the inner city.”

He has the perspective to know. He is now 55, and used to be principal of suburban Lincoln High. For the last four years, he’s run the biggest high school in Pawtucket, with 1,300 kids.

It has taught him some things. He said he used to have all the answers to solving problems like the high urban dropout rate. He now says you have to live it to understand how complex it is.

Last week, a report by the state Department of Education listed Tolman as having the second highest dropout rate in the state, at 30 percent. After a similar report, an older Tolman grad who’d gone there decades ago wrote Silva a letter saying he was miffed that his alma mater had become “a dropout factory.”Silva wrote a thoughtful response and the grad sent it my way. I’d seldom seen a principal speak so clearly about the real story behind inner city dropout rates, so I went to talk to him.

First, he gave me a tour of the school. It has standout features like a huge pool and a 1,300-seat auditorium that would almost look like PPAC if it got a paint job.

But it also has a cafeteria that only holds 240, so Tolman has to run lunch in five shifts. Silva himself does lunch duty every day, chatting with kids at their tables, because, far more than at Lincoln High, he sees his job as learning what problems kids face outside of school, and that’s where he often finds out.

Tolman is 50 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black. As for the rest, Silva said many in the “white” category are struggling immigrants from a mix of countries, or Pawtucket folks fighting poverty. To Silva, the most important indicator is the lunch-subsidy number. A school meal costs $1.50, but 60 percent of Tolman’s kids qualify for a free or reduced-cost lunch. Depending on family income, it can be as low as 35 cents, and even at that, some kids come to school unable to afford it.

Being principal of Lincoln High was easier, but being part of an inner city school is more meaningful, and he said his teachers agree. But it’s demoralizing, he said, when you get labeled a dropout factory and people think the adults who run the school are failing.

So I asked: How do you explain it?

He said a key factor is a big change in how immigrants approach America.

Silva said his own Irish grandmother came to America at age 12 for a better life, and knew she would likely never go back. She spoke English, of course, but others from places like Italy had to work hard to learn the language and become Americanized. They had no choice, having all but lost contact with their homelands.Today, said Silva, immigrants come for a better life, too, but their connections to their old country are stronger. Planes make it easy to go back and forth, e-mail and cell phones keep them in daily contact outside the borders, and the Internet brings them news from home. Even a decade ago, said Silva, watching TV used to help teach English to newcomers. Now, you can be living in Pawtucket while watching local channels from Portugal, Turkey or the Caribbean.

All of this makes it harder to teach English since kids aren’t immersed in it at home. Often, that means students aren’t able to keep up with school, or aren’t ready to graduate, and that adds to the dropout rate.

It gets more complex. It’s common, said Silva, for students from Caribbean countries to go home for Christmas, and to stay for several months. Unlike in the past, many immigrant families today want their kids to remain part of their home culture. They even do it for protective reasons, thinking American society is too permissive. By the time the kids return, they’ve been listed as dropouts. Some students have done this several times, and though it’s the same kid, said Silva, it adds to the dropout count twice.

There’s even a new phenomenon, said Silva, where students will arrive in the middle of the school year from places like the Dominican Republic. In some cases, Silva said, part of their goal is to learn enough English to be able to work in the tourist industry back home. When they feel they’re ready, he said, they head back, and again, those kids are considered dropouts.

Poverty is a big factor, too. Until he came to Tolman, Silva never realized how often some families move. People in unskilled jobs face frequent layoffs, and if they find a new job across state, they’ll move to be near it. The housing crisis is also hitting Tolman hard. When there’s a foreclosure of an apartment building, renters have to find new homes, sometimes outside Pawtucket, which means students leave. They also leave because of family breakups. If Tolman is able to show they’ve re-enrolled in a new high school, they’re considered transfer students. But some families are hard to track, so they’re listed as dropouts.

Silva also sees a disturbing turn in the economy. It’s different, he said, from the way it was even decades ago, when unskilled workers could find upwardly mobile jobs. Now, he said, many parents just tread water at minimum wage for years, often working two jobs, and still falling behind. In suburban schools, he said, students work at places like McDonald’s for spending money. At Tolman, kids turn to such jobs to help pay the family’s bills. The more job-hours they take on, the more their grades suffer, making them feel like failures in the classroom. But they feel like successes outside school by bringing home a paycheck. Education becomes second to surviving. Silva added that some kids have so little means that they wear broken cell phones on their belts to fit in, so a job with immediate money becomes a compelling reason to leave school.

Silva and his teachers try to stay in touch with them, to get them back, which will prepare them for a better future, but even if they do come back, by then they’re listed as dropouts.

Even those who leave to get GEDs are considered dropouts. The rules, said Silva, make the count look much worse in the inner city.

Silva said that by the time a student has transferred schools three times, facing frustrating adjustments, dropout rates go way up. It’s common for new students at Tolman to have been through three or more transfers. He had one student, he said, who counted Tolman as her 14th school. Often, these are foster or group home kids whose lives are in constant flux. Such students are rare in suburban schools, but common in the inner city. Silva agrees the dropout numbers make Tolman and similar schools look bad.

But he said they don’t reflect the complexities of the American inner city, and how immigrant patterns have changed.

He also said they don’t reflect how great Tolman’s kids are, and how much they overcome.

Most important, he said the “dropout factory” label obscures what his teachers are up against.

And how important their work is in a school like Tolman.

He wishes people would realize that.

mpatinkin@projo.com