The Georgia legislature’s Senate committee studying the age of mandatory education is recommending the state raise the minimum age a child can drop out of school from 16 to 17 while improving wraparound services to encourage students to graduate.
“We’ve all come to a conclusion that something needs to be done at an earlier age to influence these young lives and not give up on them so fast,” said the committee chair, Sen. Chuck Payne, a Republican from Dalton, at the committee’s meeting at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce.
The committee has issued a final report on how to tackle Georgia’s dropout rate which lawmakers hope will decrease Georgia’s prison population based on Department of Corrections data showing the majority of inmates come into the system without a high school diploma.
(READ MORE: Report: ‘Dropout factories’ on decline in US)
Increasing Georgia’s dropout age is not a new concept. Some advocates have been pushing it since 2011, when it was first proposed by Sen. Lester Jackson, a Democrat from Savannah.