Free State High School junior Keil Eggers has been selected to sit on the state’s council looking at high school dropout rates.

For junior Keil Eggers, the highlights of his time at Free State High School have occurred outside the classroom and even outside Kansas.

He has gone to Chicago as a delegate for Model United Nations and traveled throughout the state for marching band and choir competitions.

Eggers draws from those experiences when offering advice on how to keep students in high school.

“The biggest part is just trying to make sure the kids have something in school they are interested in — sports or music or debate — that way they will have a reason to maintain their grades and stay in school,” Eggers said.

It’s an opinion that will be heard across the state.

Eggers is one of 16 teenagers in Kansas who will sit on the state’s Dropout Prevention Summit’s Youth Council.

The council is part of Kansas DropINs, a statewide effort to reduce high school dropout rates. The program, which draws from more than 25 organizations, is funded through a grant from America’s Promise Alliance and spearheaded by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

For the next five months, regional and statewide summits will be conducted to gather ideas on how to reduce the high school dropout rate. The end result will be recommendations on what the state and communities can do to ensure every student finishes high school, Kansas DropINs coordinator Jessica Noble said.

During the 2007-08 school year, the state saw more than 3,600 students leave school. That is 10 students a day.

It’s an alarming number, Noble said, but one the state can tackle.

“Some states are looking at upwards of 10,000 or 20,000 students a year. So, we have it far easier than other states. But it is still a problem and something that still needs to be addressed.”

Douglas County had 132 students drop out of high school between 2004 and 2007.

In the past few years, tools have come out that have helped schools identify as early as third grade those students who are at risk of dropping out. Those tools could help teachers work with students sooner, Noble said.

“By the time they get to their 16th birthday, they have long since decided whether or not they are going to drop out,” Noble said. “It’s not like they wake up one day and say, ‘I think I am going to drop out of school today.’ It is really a process that they go through.”

The youth council would work with the Kansas DropINs planning team in drafting the recommendations. The group also will receive youth feedback through an online survey.

While some of the members of the council are former or current high school dropouts, Eggers believes he was chosen for the “positive experience” he has had with school and his belief in the benefits of education.

Eggers points to his roots — his mother was the first in her family to earn a college degree — as one of the reasons he decided to become involved.

“I can see the effects of not going to college. So then to me, that situation just intensifies if you don’t have a high school diploma,” he said.