Craig — Gather all the students who have dropped out of Moffat County High School during the past nine years, give them names and faces, and the result is a disturbing one for Jane Harmon, Moffat County High School principal.

Since 1999, 343 students have dropped off the high school’s registers and didn’t attend another education program or provide documentation that they would do so, she said.

Those students make up more than two average graduating classes at the high school, which contain about 160 students each.

Those numbers bother Harmon, she said.

And she doesn’t think she should be alone in her concern.

“It should bother us,” she said. “It should bother everyone in the community.”

A student who recently dropped out of the high school could not be reached by press time Friday.

The numbers indicate Moffat County middle and high schools are faring better than the state as a whole when it comes to retaining its students.

Dropout rates among Moffat County seventh- through 12th-grade students have been on the decline in recent years. During the 2005-06 school year, 1.8 percent of those students were considered to have dropped out of school, according to the high school.

That’s down from the 4.6 percent dropout rate during the 2001-02 school year.

While Moffat County’s dropout rate has decreased, the state average has been on the rise.

The average dropout rate in Colorado currently holds at 4.5 percent, the Colorado Department of Education reported – a 0.3 increase from last school year and a 0.7 percent jump from 2003-04.

Officials at the high school and the Department of Education attribute the fluctuations to the same source: Changes in the way districts track and record students who leave their rolls.

A law passed in 2005 requires schools to consider a student to have dropped out of school unless they receive a transcript request from another school after the student has withdrawn, said Peter Fritz, CDE data and research consultant.

The exception to the rule is when a student transfers to another school within the state’s public education system, which keeps track of students within its boundaries.

“I think the districts that are really struggling with that (law) are the ones that are highly migrant,” Fritz said. These areas include the San Luis Valley and Colorado Springs, he said – areas that have high student mobility rates due to the number of migrant workers and military families, respectively.

But the law has had an opposite upshot at Moffat County.

“At the high school, we’ve taken that initiative” to track students who have left the school before graduating, said DeLaine Brown, MCHS registrar.

Harmon said she believes the effort has helped determine how many students have actually dropped out, as opposed to those who have transferred.

Still, knowing that the high school’s dropout rate lies below the state’s average doesn’t give much solace to Harmon.

“When we can put faces and names to those numbers, how can we say that even one kid (dropping out) is OK?” she said.

“In my estimation, that’s throwing a kid away. Shame on us if we condone that.”