The Class of 2024 — whose first year of high school was online — ended up having a higher graduation rate than ever before, new Wake County data shows.

Graduation rates haven’t changed much recently, dipping just some since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. But this spring saw the graduation of a class of students who began their first year of high school – what experts say is a crucial transition time – at home, learning remotely.

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About 16% of Wake County freshmen fell behind in 2021, not earning enough credits to become tenth graders. The percentage was about the same statewide.

But this spring, only about 9% of them didn’t graduate by the end of their fourth year, indicating gains in course recovery.

Wake County’s four-year graduation rate hit an all-time high of 91.3% this spring, part of an ongoing increase to its graduation rate, which was 82.9% a decade ago.

Statewide, graduation rates have steadily risen, too, hovering around 87% in recent years, up from 83.9% a decade ago. The rate was 86.9% statewide this spring.

Wakefield High School Principal Malik Bazzell said the pandemic made people feel more casual about school, and attendance dropped.

“Absenteeism was really the big change that we were affected by,” Bazzell said. “I think it's something that affected all schools nationwide. So like I said, we just had to adapt what we were doing to meet the students where they were and come up with different things to try to encourage them to come to school.”

His administration assigned an assistant principal to focus only on attendance. They formed an attendance committee, had counselors check in regularly with students.

They held Saturday School. They made students with free periods use the time to explore their coursework or new interests.

This spring, 95.2% of the Class of 2024 graduated, topping the district’s 91.3% rate and topping Wakefield High’s rate last year of 90.6%.

Some of the Wakefield interventions will have longer-lasting impacts than on just the Class of 2024.

Wakefield shifted resources to ninth graders – in 2021 and since then – and met with them individually. They brought many of those ninth graders to school two weeks early to make sure they had a smooth transition into the high school experience.

With temporary federal pandemic dollars, they hired a few math intervention teachers, and they’ve reassigned some teachers to fill those roles this fall, now that the money has run out.

“​​I think there's a new target with 98% and so we're up for that challenge,” Bazzell said.

An attentive staff plays a major role in ensuring students stay on track, said Larry Thomas, who graduated from Wakefield High this spring.

Early into his senior year last year, Thomas’s mother suffered a stroke. He missed some school, but not too much. Still, the disruption lingered throughout his year.

Counselors, teachers and other staff checked in on him, he said, and were always offering to help him as he tried to make plans for college.

That was helpful, Thomas said, because he can be “hard-headed” and often didn’t want to go outside of his family for help. Sometimes, though, he did.

“They were awesome,” Thomas said of the school staff. “They helped me out through the rest of my senior year.”

Thomas said he finished with a 3.75 GPA his freshman year.

"There’s certain things at school you can control and there’s certain things that you can’t control, but you can control what you teach," said Bazzell

The teaching placed an emphasis on accountability paired with incentives as in Tony Calabria’s class. Focusing on creative and engaging teaching methods and and getting parents involved in the process are two tactics Wakefield credits for helping its graduation rate.

"As teachers, our role was to make education more interesting, more fun and we had to get creative," said Calabria. "If you want big things you gotta do big things, right? So I ask a lot for my students, but in turn, I ask them to want a lot from me as their teacher."

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools had the highest graduation rate in our area, at 94 percent. Johnston County tied with Wake at 91 percent.