One of the main school counties in the Los Angeles county is the LAUSD. In this district alone, there are about 745,000 students enrolled to go to school in the district. The real disappointing statistic is that a third of these students will not graduate high school. This statistic is way too high and there needs to be a fix to lower the statistics. And given that the average graduation rate for the Los Angeles county is 79.3%, the LAUSD needs to improve the way they teach students. Along with the graduation rate, the California Department of Education estimated that 90.9% of students are apart of an ethnic group. In this study, Denise Huang and others from UCLA looked at the BEST program, an after school program, to see if drop out rates would decrease for students who participate in BEST. What the results showed was that students who were apart of the BEST program saw better academic achievement, positive attitudes, and better relationships towards one or both parental figures. They concluded that the BEST program and other programs like BEST are a good way for kids to be involved in extracurricular activities while also doing better in school. This article is important for my topic because it talks about ways to fix the dropout rate in Southern California schools. There have been many different methods,  but maybe there is a clear solution. While the BEST program showed that it can do positives for the community, it cannot help everyone, which is where we as a society want to reach: getting equal education for every student.