SART — Honduras's National School Dropout Early-Warning System

The Sistema de Alerta y Respuesta Temprana (SART) is Honduras's national platform for identifying students at risk of dropping out of school, operated by the Secretaría de Educación with technical and financial support from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Launched in July 2021, it draws on a data-driven methodology developed through an earlier World Bank-supported research collaboration between Honduras and Guatemala, which built statistical dropout-prediction models from school administrative data.

SART assigns risk levels to students based on attendance, academic performance, and vulnerability indicators — including internal displacement due to violence, disability, sexual or domestic violence, and refugee or asylum status — generating school-level alerts through a 'critical route' that principals and teachers are meant to act on. It has a specific focus on migrant and returnee children and adolescents, run through the Ministry's National Program for Attention to Migrant and Returned Children and Adolescents. By 2024 the Ministry reported 6,054 migrant and returnee children reinserted into the education system via SART, alongside roughly 19,000 children identified as at risk of dropping out and 9,000 flagged in irregular-migration circumstances; orientation on the system's use reached 6,869 school principals across all 18 departments.

Despite this national reach, SART lacks independent evaluation of its predictive accuracy or impact. A 2024 fact-check by the Honduran outlet El Heraldo rated a government official's claimed reduction in the national dropout rate (from roughly 3% to under 1%) as 'not verified,' finding that the Ministry of Education and national statistics institute lack current, complete underlying data — a caution that applies to any outcome figures attributed to the system.

Read the full analysis: https://sart.se.gob.hn/