Portland Public Schools posted an uptick in its district-wide graduation rate for the 10th consecutive year in 2019. But achievement essentially flatlined for some student groups and declined for others.

Nearly 81% of the district’s seniors graduated on time last year, up 1 percentage point over 2018. That’s slightly above the state average — 80% of Oregon’s high school class of 2019 graduated on time.

Students with disabilities posted some of the biggest gains in the district. Nearly 64% of seniors in that demographic earned a diploma last year, an increase of almost 6 percentage points over 2018.

About 73% of the district’s black students graduated in 2019, a gain of 2 percentage points over the previous year. The state average was 70%.

Regional Superintendent Joe LaFountaine, who oversees the district’s nine comprehensive high schools, said those gains are the product of a four-year strategic plan adopted by top brass at Portland Public Schools in 2017.

The approach calls for school administrators to become familiar with the student body to catch those who might fall through the cracks.

Principals and their staff also nudge students into classes that prepare them for life after high school, LaFountaine said, whether that’s taking on Advanced Placement coursework or enrolling in a career and technical education sequence.

“Those students emerge with career or college-ready skills,” he said.

Still, the newly released state data was a mixed bag for its largest school district.

While overall graduation rates rose, Portland Public Schools posted decreases of nearly 3 percentage points for both homeless students (54%) and for those who were enrolled in English language learners programs in high school (55%.)

“We’re not 100% successful,” LaFountaine said. “Nobody is.”

Cleveland and Madison high schools posted the largest drops in overall graduation rates: down 4 percentage points. Fewer students also graduated from Southwest Portland’s Wilson High — nearly 88%, or 3 percentage points lower than in 2018.

Economically disadvantaged students, or those eligible for free or reduced lunch, fared much worse than their peers at Cleveland, where graduation rates dropped by 13 percentage points among that demographic to 73%.

In the three years prior to 2018, graduation rates for economically disadvantaged students at Cleveland hovered between 74% and 78%.

Two of the three Portland high schools that saw dips in their overall graduation rates experienced more administrative turnover than others in the district, LaFountaine noted.

Leo Lawyer is Cleveland’s fourth principal in six years. Wilson hired its third top administrator in as many years when Filip Hristic took over this fall after five years at Roosevelt.

LaFountaine said part of the difficulty in hiring high school administrators was the sheer number of postings on job s boards for the gig.

“These are hard positions to fill,” LaFountaine said. “That’s just the reality.”

Grant and Franklin were the only schools to see a substantial increase in the percentages of economically disadvantaged students to graduate in 2019: 6 points and 4 points.

And Portland Public Schools still lags behind the state average in graduation rates for Latino students. In 2019, 72% of the district’s Latinos graduated on time versus 76% statewide.

Last year, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero said the district would implement culturally responsive programs to boost those statistics. But the graduation rate among Latinos in Portland Public Schools has remained essentially flat since 2017 as the district trails behind its regional peers.

Neighboring Beaverton graduated 77% of its Latino students in 2019. That’s the same rate the North Clackamas district posted, although it’s a slide of 2 percentage points from 2018. And in 2017, North Clackamas had a Latino graduation rate of 84%.

In Portland, the rate of Latinos graduating steadily climbed from 56% in 2014.

New Wilson principal Hristic’s tenure at Roosevelt was marked by a 20-point increase in its graduation rate, from 53% in 2014 to 73% in 2019. He said Wednesday he hadn’t seen Wilson’s graduation data yet, even though districts’ graduation rate data was released to them days before.

But he said he predicted the Southwest Portland school would have its share of inequities before he set foot in the building.

“In every school that I’ve been in, there have been educational inequities,” Hristic said. “The question is never whether they are here, but where they are and how I’m going to address them.”

At Roosevelt, Hristic and his staff were constantly on the lookout for students who “haven’t experienced success in school,” whether they were freshmen or seniors.

“With every decision we make, we are asking ourselves: What do our students need?” he said.

The approach worked, Hristic said, because every adult in the building was on the same page. They’d set a plan at the beginning of each year and fine-tune it as they went along. And over time, he said, it paid off.

“Change does not happen overnight,” he said. “It takes time to build relationships. It takes time to build trust. And it takes time to build systems, to evaluate them and to adjust them.”