CHARLESTON S.C.

Takara Perry knows if she had stayed on at St. Johns High School, she would simply have dropped out.

"I had thought about it. I was making Cs and Ds and just scraping by," she said. "There were a lot of students in each class and a lot of distractions."

Now the 17-year-old is a senior on the A-B honor roll at Septima Clark Corporate Academy, a school created to help children at risk of dropping out complete their degrees. She hopes to pursue a nursing degree at Clemson, something she never dreamed of two years ago.

For 17-year-old Tyrell Reed, lost in the crush of 1,900 students at West Ashley High School, the situation seemed even more dire.

"I was so bad off I felt if I didn't move on in the right direction I would end up on the streets," he said. "I was just running with a rough crowd."

Now a junior in his second year at Clark, he hopes to pursue his dream of going to art school to learn photography.

The stories of Perry and Reed and the academy are bright spots in what seems an intractable problem in South Carolina low high school graduation rates.

There are about 1,700 regular or vocational high schools nationwide where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year, according to an analysis of Education Department data conducted by Johns Hopkins University for The Associated Press.

Bob Balfanz, a researcher at the Baltimore university, calls such schools "dropout factories."

They include almost 52 percent of the 185 high schools in South Carolina, the highest ratio in the nation, according to the study. Balfanz says while some of the students transferred before they graduated, most dropped out.

South Carolina's dubious distinction can be explained in part because it is one of about 25 states requiring an exit exam, said Jim Foster, spokesman for the state Education Department.

Such states tend to have lower on-time graduation rates. South Carolina is also one of only six states requiring 24 credit hours for graduation while most require 12 to 14 hours, he said.