DEWIS – Dropout Early Warning Intervention System

DEWIS can be developed by a school counseling department, built into a strategic plan for a school and/or district, and integrated into a school improvement plan for your building principal. The basic functions are necessary to build a system at either the local or state level:

1. Universal screening (Universal Screening Factors) to identify students that need to be engaged and are at risk for dropping out.
2. Linking the student with an intervention (School Counseling Domains: Academic, College/Career, Personal/Social) and tracking the time spent with the student on each intervention.
3. Reporting features to evaluate the impact of interventions and monitor best practices.

Taking Action – Identify Students at Risk of Dropping Out.

School Counselors can use a variety of products to help identify students who may be at risk of dropping out. The Renton Public Schools Publication Getting to High School Graduation: Identifying Early Warning Indicators to Prevent Dropouts is an excellent article to get familiar with universal screening factors necessary to identify students at risk of dropping out of high school.

The main universal screening factors that School Counselors can focus in on are:

• Academic Credits (Student is not “at grade level” as measured by the number of credits accumulated to date toward graduation),
• State Assessment of Mastery (Student has not met standard on at least two state assessments)
• Grading (Student has failed at least one core academic class their 9th grade year)
• Discipline/Behavior (Student has been suspended or expelled from school)
• Attendance (Student has five or more unexcused absences) and
• Retention (Student has not moved to a different school between grades).

Tools that WSIPC provides to School Counselors to Identify Students at risk of dropping out:

1. Data Mining Reports: This is a process that allows counselors to “mine”, or pull out, specific data from WESPaC/WEB to create reports. Data Mining Reports could be used to screen students for indicators like attendance, discipline, and grades.
2. Washington Education Decision Support System (WEDSS): WEDSS is a data warehouse created for users of WESPaC. Counselors that have access to WEDSS will be able view and analyze student data including state assessments, MAP testing, and other district specific data. Global view of student data. WEDSS also includes an at-risk-module that can help School Counselors identify students at risk.
3. Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application used to design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources. Several other applications, such as Microsoft Visual Studio, bundle an OEM version of Crystal Reports as a general purpose reporting tool. WSIPC has developed two reports: Prevention and Intervention Summary Report and Detailed Report. These reports can be used to identify students at risk from a macro view of a whole grade level of students to a micro view of an individual student.

Tools that Dr. Tim Poynton provides to School Counselors to Identify Students at risk of dropping out:

EZAnalyze is a Microsoft Excel Add-In designed to enhance the capabilities of Excel by adding “point and click” functionality for analyzing data, creating graphs, and creating new variables. It works on both Macs and PC’s, except for Excel 2008. EZAnalyze is free to use by any School Counselor. EZAnayze can be used in conjunction with a tool like Data Mining. Student Data can be mined then a School Counselor can use EZAnalyze to filter and group students based on universal screening factors like grades, discipline, and attendance. Here is a link to the Features found within EZAnalyze. EZAnayze can be used for universial screening of researched support indicators like attendance, behavior, grades, GPA, state testing scores to build groups of students who may be at risk of dropping out of school.

Intervention Map:

Develop an Intervention Map of your school then determine which interventions will be used with which students over time

Examples of three school intervention programs falling into one of the three domains for a comprehensive approach to helping vulnerable youth.

Academic/Education Domain: – AVID

Personal/Social Domain: – WhyTry?

College/Career Readiness Domain: – Navigation 101

Intervention Mapping Tool

Tool that can be used to map out different types of interventions found in school.

Here is an example of intervention mapping of an elementary school, middle, and high schools.

Intervention Mapping Tool

Please download tool to map out interventions found within your school.

Time Tracking Tools To Link Student and/or Students to Intervention/Interventions Over Time (Process Data):

School Counselors will need a set of tools to connect time spend with a particular student and/or group of students to an intervention. EZAnalzye Time Tracker is not dependent on a school district’s student information system. Any School Counselor can download EZAnalyze Time Tracker for free. The School Counselor sets up their own intervention codes, imports a list of current students, and can begin tracking time linked to an intervention in a matter of minutes. The School Counselor only needs a computer with EZAnalyze TTE and Microsoft Excel. The database file can be saved on the local School Counselor’s computer, or saved on a thumb drive that can be locked in a file cabinet. Another tool avaliable to School Counselors who use Skyward tools like WESPaC and/or Web is the Guidance Module. The Guidance Module is not a stand alone setup for a School Counselor like EZAnalyze TTE. The Guidance Module is integrated with the school district’s student information system. School Counselors can run data minner reports, roll up data from elementary, middle, to high school, and create a check-in point for any student coming into a counseling or career center.

The EZAnalyze TimeTracker is a free macro-enabled Excel workbook designed to perform note-keeping and time-tracking functions, and generate reports for accountability and improved service to students. It now works on both Macs and PC’s, except for Excel 2008.

The Guidance Module is a tool found within WESPaC. School Counselors can load student engagements that need to be tracked over time into the guidance system. The School Counselor then can setup a student kiosk to track time spend on a particular intervention.

Evaluate the impact of interventions and monitor best practices. – (Results Data and Perceptual Data Tools)

School Counselors are going to need a way to evaluate if the interventions they are using with individual and/or groups of students is making a positive difference. School Counselors can use a survey to measure pre- and post- perceptual data with students to determine if their beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions about their situation has improved. At the same time, School Counselors can use a data analysis tool to measure if attendance has improved, grades have risen, negative behavior has decreased, failure rate has decreased, testing scores have improved, GPA has risen, and etc.

Here are a couple of tools that can be used:

Survey Tool for Perceptual Data: The great piece about using surveys from counselingtechnology.net is that you can setup the survey to work with EZAnalyze. At the same time, this survey tool is free to any Professional School Counselor.

Counseling Technology – http://www.counselingtechnology.net/

About the Surveys