City Council to Petition State to Raise Legal Dropout Age to 18

Boston City Council unanimously agreed on Wednesday to petition state legislators to increase the age at which the city’s public and private school students could legally drop out from 16 to 18.

Several councilors said that keeping students an additional two years would allow teachers and counselors to provide them with additional academic and social support and more time to convince them that it was in their interest to graduate high school and go on to college.

At-large Councilor John Connolly, who presides over the council’s Committee on Education, said that more than 1,000 16-year-olds dropped out of high school during the last school year. The employment rate for those students, he said, would be 27 percent, and their median income $2,600, according to representatives from Northeastern University who attended a public hearing about the proposed order.

District 2 Councilor Bill Linehan supported increasing the legal dropout age but said he worried about the ability of the schools to handle 16- and 17-year-olds who don’t want to be in school.

“Trust me,” he said. “They will be difficult.”

Were the state to pass the proposed law, he said, it would take an “enormous” amount of money and commitment from the council to enforce.

At-large Councilor Ayanna Pressley agreed, saying that the city would have to increase support for teen mothers and others with adult responsibilities to ensure that they stayed in school, an initative that she said she strongly supported.

“This measure goes a long way in raising expectations to create a culture to prevent our most vulnerable people from dropping out,” she said.

The drop-out rate at JP's for the 2008-2009 school year was 5.4 percent, according to a state report published in the Boston Globe.

In other council business, the council will try to hold city and state bodies responsible for shoveling snow:

• It plans to hold a public hearing in October to determine which government bodies are responsible for shoveling snow from certain sidewalks, bridges and bus stops that were neglected last year. District 6 Councilor Matt O'Malley said that the city's Department of Public Works ended up clearing several public spaces that the MBTA, the Department of Conservation and Recreation or the state's Department of Transportation were supposed to take care of.