If there was a one in five chance that your child would leave school before graduating, would you be concerned? Well that is exactly what happened with the Portsmouth and Suffolk school systems according to Virginia Department of Education data.

Nearly one in five students who entered ninth grade for the first time in 2004 left school within four years before graduating. That is sobering news when you have a dropout rate of 18 percent. That rate is especially concerning when it is nearly 10 percent higher than the state’s rate of 8.7 percent.

Only one other South Hampton Roads school division – Norfolk – had a dropout rate higher than the state’s rate of 8.7 percent. Thirteen percent of students in that city left school early, placing Norfolk among the bottom 25 of the 131 Virginia districts reporting data.

Chesapeake (6.9 percent) and Virginia Beach (5.5 percent) were below the state rate.