. >> suarez: on top of behavior issues, charbonneau also inherited a school where one in four of the students were failing, and the district was seeing a spike in homelessness. broadmore mid school is made up mostly of minority students. 95% of them are eligible for free or reduced priced lunch meaning the kids come from low-income families that qualify for federal assistance. but despite these challenges charbonneau says her school has largely been able to turn things around in the last three years. >> we have lowered our suspension rate from 50% to 15% which is below the national average. we have lowered the failure rate to 7%. and improved attendance in each and every grade level. >> suarez: it's an unlikely success story charbonneau said began when a program called diplomas now came to broadmore. diplomas now identifies at-risk students long before they could ever drop out of high school and then provides a set of intervention and support guidelines to raise achievement. the idea came from one of the nation's leading experts on dropout prevention. robert ballfast of johns hop din

but despite these challenges charbonneau says her school has largely been able to turn things around in the last three years. >> we have lowered our suspension rate from 50% to15% which is below the national average. we have lowered the failure rate to 7%. and improved attendance in each and every grade level. >> suarez: it's an unlikely success story charbonneau said began when a program called diplomas now came to broadmore. diplomas now identifies at-risk students long before they could ever drop out of high school and then provides a set of intervention and support guidelines to raise achievement. the idea came from one of the nation's leading experts on dropout prevention. robert ballfast of johns hop dins university. he spent years developing a data-driven model that flags early warning indicators to target students who show signs of falling behind in subjects like math and english. >> our focal point is always starting with 6th and 9th grade because the data shows if you can make the transition to middle school and the transition to high school and really get from 6th to 10th