Abstract:
Across the United States each year, schools implement national and state reforms dedicated to improving district personnel, district budgets, and district instructional resources for the improvement of student achievement and career readiness. In the last twenty years, Georgia schools failed to significantly improve student graduation performance, this is particularly true for students living in rural, single-parent households (County Health Rankings, 2019; Dalton, 2019 GADOE, 2019; KCDC, 2019. The purpose of this study was to investigate the experiences of students who graduated from high school, came from single parent homes, and lived in an identified rural Georgia Title I school district. I incorporated an embedded, exploratory case study with a multiple-case design and investigated the social and academic experiences of six participants (Yin, 2018). Participants were identified from two rural, Title I school districts in central Georgia through the use of both snowball and purposive sampling procedures (Guetterman, 2015). After analyzing participant data, I concluded high school graduates who lived in single-parent households and attended rural Title I school districts established a secure attachment to overcome or eliminate associated risks. When the consequences were minimized or eliminated in a student’s home microsystem, the effects were noticeable in their school microsystem.