What happens when we don’t give high schoolers a real option like GED prep?
Jaylen came into my fourth-period English class every morning for six weeks before I realized he wasn’t actually doing anything. He sat in the back, hood up, earbuds in, and I figured he was one of those students who just didn’t want to engage. But one day I asked the class to write a quick response to a prompt, and I walked around like I always do. His paper was blank. Not almost blank. Completely empty.
I knelt down next to his desk and asked if he understood the question. He pulled out his earbuds and shrugged. “I can’t do this,” he said. Not in a dramatic, angry way. Just flat, like it was math. Like two plus two equals he-can’t-do-this, and that was just what the numbers said.
Jaylen was seventeen. He had been held back once in middle school, and he’d missed a chunk of his freshman year because his mom got sick and he stayed home to watch his little brother. He needed thirty credits to graduate, and he had fourteen. At the rate he was going, he’d be twenty-one by the time he walked across the stage. He knew this. We knew this. But nobody in the building said it out loud.
One day he stayed after class and asked me, “If I just drop out, can I take the GED at the community center?” He said it like he was asking for a hall pass. I told him he could take the GED test at the community center, but that he’d have to prepare for it on his own. That’s when he told me he’d already looked into it. The prep classes cost four hundred dollars. They met three nights a week. And he’d have to drive forty minutes to get there because there was no public bus route that went that direction after six o’clock.
“So what am I supposed to do?” he asked.
I didn’t have a good answer.
Here’s the thing: we spend all this energy keeping kids in school, but we don’t offer any real alternatives when the traditional path isn’t working. We tell a seventeen-year-old with seven failed classes to “stay the course” and “work harder” and “come to tutorials after school,” and we wonder why he stops showing up. The moment a student like Jaylen realizes he can’t graduate on time, he often figures, why keep trying at all? And then he drops out. Not because he’s lazy. Not because he doesn’t care. Because nobody ever offered him a realistic plan B.
Offering a GED prep program inside the high school isn’t giving up on students. It’s actually the opposite. It’s saying: you’re not going to get the traditional diploma the traditional way, but you still need a path, and this school is going to help you stay on it.
The students who need this the most aren’t the ones who disappear right away. They’re the ones who hang around for a while, getting more frustrated, acting out or shutting down while they watch doors close. By the time they hit sixteen or seventeen, they’ve often spent years being told they’re behind. They stop believing they can catch up. And a forty-page transcript correction plan isn’t going to convince them otherwise.
I started looking into what it would actually take to run a GED prep class as a school-day elective. It turns out it’s not as complicated as you’d think. In our state, a high school that partners with a local adult education program can offer the prep class during zero period or as a credit-bearing elective. The students can even earn high school electives while they’re working on the certificate. You need a teacher who’s certified in adult ed or has the right endorsement, but you already have teachers in the building who understand what it means to teach kids who feel left behind. The woman who runs our after-school credit recovery program used to teach at the county jail, and she’s told me more than once that she’d run a GED class in a heartbeat if the school would just schedule it.
But the logistics aren’t the biggest barrier. The mindset is. There’s a fear among some staff and families that offering the GED is the same as saying “you don’t have to finish.” One of our guidance counselors said it out loud at a staff meeting: “If we give them a GED option, everyone’s going to slack off and just take the easy way out.” I understand that worry, but it doesn’t match what I’ve seen. Jaylen wasn’t slacking off. He was drowning. And the kids who are passing their classes and getting credits aren’t going to switch to a GED track just because it exists. That would be like someone who can run a mile suddenly choosing to crawl just because walking is an option.
What the GED actually does is change the math for a kid who’s already out of options. It puts something within reach. For Jaylen, graduating with his class was physically impossible—he would have needed a twenty-credit senior year. But passing the GED? That could happen by spring. He could go to community college. He could get a job that requires a certificate. He’d still be moving forward, just on a different road.
Last month Jaylen stopped coming to my class. I heard through the grapevine that he’d picked up an afternoon shift at a warehouse because his family needed the money. I won’t pretend he’s fine. He’s not. But I also had a conversation with a sophomore named Denise a few weeks ago, and it got me thinking again. Denise is sixteen. She has the reading level of a seventh grader, and she’s been passed along for years because nobody wanted to fail her. She told me she hates school and that she’s probably going to drop out next year when she’s seventeen. When I asked her what she’d do instead, she said “whatever, maybe get my GED.” She had no idea what it was, exactly. She just knew it was somewhere outside of this building, and that was enough to make it sound better than what she had.
If Denise’s school had a GED prep program in the building, she might walk into that classroom on day one and sit across from a teacher who says, “Okay, here’s what we need to work on. Let’s start with reading.” That’s not a failure. That’s a lifeline.
But right now, the only message we’re sending kids like Denise is “try harder or leave.” And when they leave, we act surprised. We send them off with no plan, no support, no structure, and we expect them to figure out one of the hardest things a person can do—study for and pass a high school equivalency exam—completely on their own.
That’s not on them. That’s on us.
I still don’t know what happened to Jaylen. Some mornings I look at the empty chair in the back row and wonder if anyone ever sat him down and said “here’s a way through.” I hope someone did. I hope he found his own alternative, like a part-time program at the community center, or someone’s cousin who helps kids study, or something else I can’t see from my side of the classroom.
But I also know this: he never should have had to find that path by himself. A school that claims to be about student success doesn’t get to wash its hands of a kid the moment the traditional checklist doesn’t work out. We need GED prep inside our high school buildings—students actually get on campus, a teacher who knows how to work with them, and a plan that starts from where they are. Not every student needs it. But the ones who do deserve more than a blank worksheet and a shrug: “I can’t do this.”
Because the truth is, they can’t. Not on that path. But that doesn’t mean the path can’t be changed.
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