While Suffolk Public Schools’ dropout rate improved from last year, the division’s on-time graduation rate dropped slightly below last year’s rate, and both figures remain below the state average, according to data released Monday by the Virginia Department of Education.

The data released looks at students that entered public high schools in 2014.

For the 2017-2018 school year, Suffolk Public Schools had 86.7 percent of their students graduate on time. This is almost a half-point drop from last year’s rate of 87.1 percent. In both years, Suffolk has performed below the state average.

According to the VDOE, the state average for on-time graduation is 91.6 percent, a slight increase from last year.

Some groups within the Suffolk Public Schools population have been consistently performing under the state average as well as performing below Suffolk’s rate.

Students that are economically disadvantaged tend to perform worse than most groups within Suffolk, and during the most recent school year, they had an on-time graduation rate of 79.9 percent, which is more than 6 percentage points below all of Suffolk’s students. This number has inched up slightly since the 2016-2017 school year.

Other groups seemed to perform just above or just below what Suffolk Public Schools did as a whole.

The dropout rate in Suffolk decreased an entire percentage point from last school year to only 7.1 percent, which equates to 75 dropouts.

Despite the improvement, they are still almost two points below the state average of 5.5 percent.

The dropout rate has increased for students that are economically disadvantaged, and that increase has been steadily occurring over the last three years. About 1 in 8 economically disadvantaged kids dropped out in the most recent school year, which equates to 47 students.

The only other group performing below those that are economically disadvantaged are students with disabilities, who have a dropout rate of 23.4 percent. This was a slight increase from last year.

From those that graduated, almost half of the students graduated with a standard diploma, with about 38 percent receiving an advanced diploma. This data was nearly identical to the state average.

Nobody from the school division was available for comment on the data.