In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in the northwest corner of South Carolina, high schools' attempts to curb student dropouts may not match what many people picture when they hear talk of the nation's "dropout factories." Yet one-fifth of the 2,000 high schools nationwide categorized that way by researchers at Johns Hopkins University are in rural areas, some of them small schools where students get a lot of personal attention. The 2004 report "Locating the Dropout Crisis" first drew attention to a list of about 2,000 high schools that researchers considered to be dropout factories--"an institution that does a good job of systematically producing dropouts," said Thomas C. West, a University of Chicago researcher who is affiliated with the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, which put out the report. Since the inception of the list, most of the attention to the nation's dropout problem has been on urban schools, where the average graduation rate for the class of 2006 was 58.7 percent, compared with 73.1 percent in rural schools, according to Diplomas Count 2009. While most of the attention is on urban high schools with low graduation rates, rural schools also struggle to retain at-risk students.