Somebody asked me, recently, whether there’s any way to know how many students leave Tiverton High School for private schools. It’s an interesting question, and the short answer is “yes,” but in a sense, “no.”

The RI Dept. of Education (RIDE) keeps records of the students from each district who attend private schools, including the schools that they attend. The problem is that the way the state keeps the numbers makes it time consuming to pare them down to a usable form.  Even when that work is done, though, I don’t think such records go back for a very long time.  Since what we really need are cohorts (tracing grade levels from year to year), and because factors like the economy can affect the data, all of the work cleaning data might produce useless results if they only cover the last few years.

Nonetheless, I thought the question interesting enough to kick off a new feature on Tiverton Fact Check, for which readers can email us questions about Tiverton (about statistics, about process, about the law, or about whatever) and we’ll do our best to answer them.  In this case, I looked to RIDE’s October enrollment data, which goes back to the 1998-1999 school year.

Specifically, I compared Tiverton to North Smithfield (because similar) and Barrington (because dissimilar in a way that Tiverton should work to change), and found:

To answer the reader’s question as directly as this data allows, for the twelve years that we can compare the number of students starting eighth grade in Tiverton with the number starting twelfth grade, the average number of students lost is 30.  That’s an average of a 17% drop in high school seniors from the start of eighth grade.

For comparison, North Smithfield lost an average of 20 students, or 13%, while Barrington actually gained an average of 8 students, or 3%.