Richmond awarded diplomas to 1,156 students in June, or 81.4 percent of the 1,421 students in the Class of 2015, new data from the Virginia Department of Education shows.

The good news: That is Richmond’s best showing since the state began reporting systematic graduation results for each class in 2008.

Based on diploma awards, city schools have come a long way from seven years ago when only 65.6 percent of seniors graduated in four years.

“We are moving in the right direction,” Superintendent Dana T. Bedden said Wednesday after reviewing the results.

The improvement is only incrementally higher than last year, when 80.5 percent of seniors in the Class of 2014 completed high school in four years, which is considered on time.

Despite the upswing, the city’s public school graduation percentage continues to trail the state’s on-time graduation rate, which hit 90.5 percent this year.

Dr. Bedden said Richmond “would love to close that gap.”

“Our goal is to have 100 percent of students graduate on time,” he said. “But remember, every student is not going to graduate in four years. We want to make sure we are keeping students engaged and are continuing to work with them” so they at least graduate in five or six years.

He pointed to two nontraditional programs that Richmond offers to enable over-age students to succeed in their quest for diplomas — the established Performance Learning Center initiative and the new Aspire Academy. Both use online learning and operate on shorter schedules geared toward students’ circumstances.

The new state graduation data indicates that Richmond’s on-time graduation rate still ranks among the bottom 10 percent of Virginia’s 131 school districts and looks good only in comparison with Petersburg, which graduated about 71 percent of its Class of 2015 students.

The closest neighbors, Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico counties, graduated 90 percent or better of their high school seniors.

Dr. Bedden said the high level of poverty in the city makes comparisons impossible with suburban neighbors, where students face fewer family hurdles on the road to graduation.

He acknowledged that Armstrong High School awarded the lowest percentage of diplomas in the Class of 2015, graduating just 72.8 percent of the 246 class members. That represents a drop of 7.5 percentage points from 2014 when 80 percent of students at Armstrong received diplomas.

More disappointing, 40 members of the Armstrong Class of 2015 dropped out, for a dropout rate of 16.3 percent, triple the state dropout rate of 5.4 percent. The Armstrong dropout rate also was the highest among the city’s eight public high schools and well above the city’s overall dropout rate of 167 students, or 11.8 percent of the Class of 2015.

Dr. Bedden said there is a focus on improving graduation results at Armstrong and its feeder middle schools. He said more focus has been put on academics at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle because “too many kids are coming to Armstrong who are not prepared to perform at the high school level.”

He also noted that Armstrong this year has re-established a ninth grade academy “to do more work with incoming freshmen.” The academy approach provides more attention to the social, emotional and academic needs of first-time high school students.

Along with the nontraditional efforts, Dr. Bedden said the school system is going to do more to prepare students at Armstrong and other city schools for employment immediately after high school. He said RPS is working with the business community to provide “more defined career pathways” that will benefit students who are more eager for employment than college.

If all goes well, more students will be walking out of school into the workforce, he said. “We want to serve the needs of all our students.”

In contrast to the decline at Armstrong, George Wythe and Huguenot high schools were definite graduation bright spots in Richmond.

George Wythe awarded diplomas in 2015 to 205 students, or 84.4 percent of the 243 students who started high school there four years earlier.

That was a nearly a 10 percentage point increase from the 75.5 percent graduation rate for the Class of 2014.

Huguenot, meanwhile, awarded 268 diplomas, with 87.3 percent of the 307 students who started four years earlier graduating. That was up 7 percentage points from 2014.

Three other schools also represented pluses. John Marshall High School, for example, graduated 83.5 percent of its Class of 2015, up 1 percentage point from 2014, while two smaller schools, Franklin Military Academy and Open High School graduated 100 percent of their classes of 2015, matching results for 2014.

Two other schools, Thomas Jefferson and Richmond Community high schools, reported slight declines in their graduation rates.

Thomas Jefferson reported awarding 229 diplomas. That represented 90.9 percent of the 252 students in the Thomas Jefferson Class of 2015, down about 1 percentage point from the 92.3 graduation rate in 2014. Thomas Jefferson still was slightly ahead of the state’s graduation rate.

Richmond Community, meanwhile, graduated 33 of 34 members of its Class of 2015, or 97.1 percent, down from 100 percent in 2014.

The graduation data from the state looks only at results for students in a specific class who started as first-time ninth-graders. That masks the real dropout rate in Richmond and other localities.

In 2011, Richmond actually reported enrolling 1,699 ninth-graders, comprised of the 1,421 first-time students in the Class of 2015 and 278 over-age students from previous classes who had fallen behind.

By June 2015, four years later, at least 236 of those 1,699 students had dropped out, or 13.9 percent. That includes the 167 students from the Class of 2015 and at least 66 other students from previous classes.