This looks like a very promising model:

There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years — completely free.

Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students — a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.

Here, and at North Carolina's other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.

"We don't want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu," said Lakisha Rice, the principal. "We want the ones who need our kind of small setting."

Results have been impressive. Not all students at North Carolina's early-college high schools earn two full years of college credit before they graduate — but few drop out.

"Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that's just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years," said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit group spearheading the state's high school reform.

In addition, North Carolina's early-college high school students are getting slightly better grades in their college courses than their older classmates.

While North Carolina leads the way in early-college high schools, the model is spreading in California, New York, Texas and elsewhere, where such schools are seen as a promising approach to reducing the high school dropout rate and increasing the share of degree holders — two major goals of the Obama administration.

More than 200 of the schools are part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Early College High School Initiative, and dozens of others, scattered throughout the nation, have sprung up as projects of individual school districts.

"As a nation, we just can't afford to have students spending four years or more getting through high school, when we all know senior year is a waste," said Hilary Pennington of the Gates Foundation, "then having this swirl between high school and college, when a lot more students get lost, then a two-year degree that takes three or four years, if the student ever completes it at all."

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For Students at Risk, Early College Proves a Draw

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: February 7, 2010

RAEFORD, N.C. — Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College