UNC grad student Wooten a finalist for innovation grant

One UNC graduate student is working to raise the state’s high school graduation rate — one student at a time.

Pharmacy graduate student Julian Wooten is a finalist to win $5,000, which would fund his idea called STENCIL, or Students and Teachers Employing New Criteria in Learning.

Still just an idea, STENCIL will be a type of software that tracks the risk factors that can lead a student to drop out of high school, Wooten said.

He is a finalist for the Emerging Issues Prize for Innovation, a contest created by N.C. State University.

Each year, The Institute for Emerging Issues (IEI) challenges North Carolina students to create a solution for one of the state’s biggest issues.

Lane Smith, outreach manager for IEI, said this year’s challenge was to come up with an innovative way to increase North Carolina’s graduation rate, which is 77.7 percent.

These risk factors include low attendance, poor course performance and apathy toward involvement in school, he said.

Wooten said that STENCIL will track students for these risk factors.

If the student exhibits too many risk factors, school administrators and parents will be notified by STENCIL, so that an intervention can be held, he said.

After receiving applicants from almost 70 schools, the IEI judges chose five high school and five college finalists, she said.

The submissions were judged on four criteria: innovation, feasibility, a clear action/implementation plan and overall merit, Smith said.

The final round is voted on by the public, and the winners will be announced Feb. 7, she said.

Wooten said his program is unique because other ideas focus on mentoring, which is more difficult to sustain because it depends on a steady source of qualified mentors.

With his software, there is no fluctuation in the ability to address the problem, he said.

If he wins, Wooten plans to use the prize money to have programmers create the software, he said.

School systems have been using similar educational data programs for the past decade, said Stephanie Knott, spokeswoman for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.

She said whether or not these programs succeed depends on staff training and who is allowed to access the programs.

But the current systems only capture some of the data that can be used to identify risk factors, Wooten said.

He said his program allows the user to input empirical observations, such as attitude and disciplinary action.

“New ideas, such as STENCIL, are needed for this big problem of high school attrition,” he said.

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