The Milton-Freewater Unified School District saw its four-year graduation rate climb to 85.5% for the 2019-20 school year.

That’s an improvement from 2018-19, when the graduation rate for the district was 79.8%, Superintendent Aaron Duff announced Friday.

The increase helped the district leapfrog the state average, which also saw an improvement in the most recent school year.

The state’s graduation rate went from 80% in 2018-19 to 82.6% in 2019-20, the Oregon Department of Education announced Thursday.

Milton-Freewater’s higher rate gets it back on the upward trend it had been tracking before a drop in 2018-19.

Duff said the the graduation numbers rose each year from 73% in 2015-16 to 82% in 2017-18, before slipping back into the 70s last year.

“Overall it has been moving up, but each class is different,” he said.

Though the state just released its numbers, Duff said the improvement wasn’t a surprise.

“We had a pretty good idea of what our graduation rate would be throughout the year,” he said. “We track students throughout the year, so when the state comes out and says what the rate it, it’s pretty close to what we project it to be.”

The superintendent said records showed an increased number of students were already on track to graduate before the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools in mid-March.

Similarly to Washington, Oregon took steps to not punish students for the difficulties of the pandemic last spring. Students who were on track to graduate before virus-related closures struck were allowed to do so.

However, Duff doesn’t want people to think students graduated because of the pandemic rules. He emphasized that to benefit from the guideline, students had to already be on track to graduate.

“A lot of our students had already met the graduation credit requirement,” Duff said. “People need to think about this. As a senior, you really have very few credits required … I hate to shortchange kids because of COVID. Graduation is a 13-year process. We’re talking a couple months of that 13-year process that they didn’t get graded.”

This school year is different, however. Students are being graded, and they are struggling in distance learning. Nationally, schools are seeing far more students with F grades than they have in the past.

Milton-Freewater students have not been immune. In December, Duff told the U-B that about half of the district’s students had at least one F grade.

However, rather than worry about the impact the pandemic will have on this year’s graduation rate, Duff said he’d rather focus on minimizing it.

The district is set to start a slow process of returning students to the classroom for short sessions on Feb. 8. The district will be using a hybrid schedule different from the a.m./p.m. hybrid schedule used by several other districts.

All students will spend the first half of the day in distance learning. For grades K-5, half of the student body will attend two hours in the classroom on Mondays and Wednesdays while the other half will attend Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Students in grades 6-12 will attend two classes a week in person as well.

Duff said he hopes some face-to-face time with teachers will help students catch up or stay on track for graduation.

Though fewer students might make it to graduation in June, he said the district will work with students who don’t make it by then to cross the finish line shortly thereafter.

“We’ll have some kids that will finish in the summer,” Duff said. “We may have some kids that just need a little bit of help in the fall and knock out a couple of classes. But a lot of it will depend on students getting back on campus, and that’s why we’re moving in that direction.”