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Q. I never in a million years thought that I could possibly recommend a student get a GED as opposed to completing the high school diploma. The THOUGHT of doing so was odious to me and contrary to everything that I believe in. I'm almost to the point where I'm reconsidering my position on this issue. Can you think of any circumstances under which you would recommend to a student or his/her parents that a GED should be considered as an alternative to a high school diploma? Have you ever recommended a student get a GED - what happened? Did he/she do it? Did you do any follow up to see how he/she turned out?

A. I've never personally taken it upon myself to recommend a student drop out of high school to get a GED, but when it is clear that the student has decided to drop out, I encourage them to get their GED as the "second best" option. It seems like more and more students just "disappear" during the semester. These are often the chronically absent students, or ones who finally realized that they have so few credits toward graduation that it will take them another full year to graduate beyond their expected time. I have some students who "think" that they are seniors, but in reality they are classified as sophomores and sometimes even freshmen because they have failed so many of their classes over all those years. I have seen seniors drop out during their last semester (and they would have graduated.) Strange world. When I get the forewarning from one of the potential dropouts that they are considering doing this, I nearly get on my hands and knees begging them to stay in school. I had one boy during summer school (he needed to make up one semester of junior English so that he could graduate) who was making an "A" in summer school, but he came in and told me that he was dropping the class (only two weeks to go) because he had a job at the car wash and he wanted to make enough money to buy himself a car. I gave the boy my home phone number and told him to call me over the weekend (this was on a Friday) if he was really going to drop. I also talked to him for an extended time that day. I told him that perhaps for the next two weeks he could just work in the afternoons and evenings (he told me no, that they only needed someone in the mornings- during summer school class time). I also asked him what kind of car could he expect to buy while he was making minimum wage. I begged him to stick it out for two more weeks so he would at least have his high school diploma. He did call me that weekend, and we talked about all this even more. But he said that the job was too good to pass up. When summer school was just a couple of days from being over, the boy showed up at my classroom door. Within a week of taking the carwash job, he had been fired. He said that he wished that he would have listened to me. So, Jerry, in a round about way, my answer is: if a student has already made the decision to drop out of school and there is no way that I can convince them to stay, then yes, I will strongly suggest that at least they get their GED. There are a handful of former students who did this, and then after working in the 'real world' for a couple of years, decided to go to college. These students had the ACT/SAT scores to go... and for the most part, the added maturity helped them succeed in college... but most of the drop out stories aren't that encouraging.

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