The calendar says Sept. 4, but for a lot of Rapid City students, today is New Year's Day.

Today is the first day of school for the Rapid City public school system, and the launch of another new year of classroom learning, extra-curricular activities and school cafeteria food.

Whether a kid is just starting kindergarten, heading to high school for the first time or leaving the nest for college, the first day of school - with its anticipation, expectation and hope for the future - always seems more like the beginning of a new year than New Year's Day ever will.

We won't know exactly how many students will be in class when school starts today until they count heads, but history proves that too many of them won't still be enrolled when the school year ends next spring.

Exact numbers of high school drop-outs are hard to establish, but the S.D. Department of Education estimates that about 900 students leave school annually. While the state has an overall high school graduation rate of 90 percent, we know the drop-out rate for smaller populations of at-risk students is much higher.

Those numbers promise to change when the new compulsory age for school attendance increases from 16 to 18 in South Dakota in 2009. The 2007 South Dakota Legislature made staying in school mandatory until age 18.

We support the new law, but acknowledge the complications it brings to a school system and to a wide range of community-based services and a juvenile justice systems that involve 16- and 17-year-old youth.

School and community officials are already planning for those challenges.

South Dakota Voices for Children will host the symposium "Community Partnerships that Keep Kids in School" on Sept. 27-28 in Pierre. The S.D. Juvenile Justice Symposium III is aimed at professionals on the front lines of truancy and drop-out prevention. It offers workshops such as "What works with tough kids" and "Strategies for working with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders."

The Rapid City school community can be proud of the innovative ways it has already found to help at-risk kids complete their high school educations: the Oyate education classrooms; online course offerings and alternative courses at Jefferson and Lincoln Academies, to name just a few. To be sure, the new age-18 compulsory attendance law will require even more creative approaches to educational success for a difficult demographic.

We applaud all efforts to produce more high school graduates in South Dakota.

That's a great resolution for all of us to make at the start of this "New Year."