SchoolsRetooled TM

A proposal to re-engage students not attending high school

February 10, 2011 at 12:30 PM Leave a comment

Mission Statement

 Our Mission: To create a learning environment that enables students who are overage and under-credited to re-engage in education, design a personalized plan for accelerated progress toward graduation, and chart a path for success after high school.

 We have the vision that every student should finish high school prepared for a bright future. To be successful, students must rediscover their voice within the community, their identity as lifelong learners, and their goals to continue their educations and pursue rewarding careers.

 We believe that change is not easy and that every students needs to participate in a precedent setting re-entry program in order to reset their expectations for achievement.

We empower students to define their own credit recovery plans based on their learning styles, program flexibility, and decision support systems.

We know that educational opportunities and mentoring experiences extend beyond the school walls and seek partners for virtual learning, dual enrollment in college, community service, and workplace training.

Together, we value diversity within our academic village and approach one another with a tone of decency, respect, and the presumption of good intentions. We strive to meet the needs of each student as an individual while celebrating success as a community.

Essential Aspects of the Program

The new high school or program will re-engage students and facilitate their successful completion of high school through

• A unique full-immersion entry period for resetting expectations for student achievement,
• A student-specific learning plan for accelerated progress to graduation, and
• Advisory programs to enable students to reinvent themselves and facilitate decision-making.

Students will rediscover their voice within the community and their identity as lifelong learners. Each will graduate with access to continuing education and aspirations for a rewarding career.

Initially, academic programs would comprise short cycles of full-time immersion in a content area. Each curriculum would be tailored for remediation and comprehensiveness to meet the needs of students. In addition to attending classes, students would have the option of spending part of each day either pursuing online course work and independent assignments or getting more individual instruction in a skills lab environment. Diagnostic testing for learning issues or knowledge gaps would inform instruction as well.

Students who have been caught up in failure cycles need multiple opportunities for success early in the change process. Compact course modules allow then to accumulate credits relatively quickly and to experience deeper understanding of content that once mystified them. From an instructional perspective, content focus allows for greater flexibility and creativity within the curriculum while meeting specific learning needs.

Once students have developed new patterns for engagement in learning, they would have the option to modify their schedules to define course sequences, expand the curriculum, or pursue offsite learning opportunities. Ownership of their educations will be crucial for student success in this phase. Advisors would facilitate program development by helping students create pacing plans and apply for alternative learning options. Each course would be offered in at least two levels of intensity.

The Advisory program would address issues of identity, voice, and goal setting. Students who have stopped attending school demonstrate a paradoxical mix of leadership and inertia. Often, they have acted decisively and against the advice of others based on a limited view of their possibilities, choosing isolation and academic failure as self-fulfilling prophecies. The goal of the Advisory would be to allow the students to see themselves as leaders while giving them a way to find their voices back in a school community. Small group activities would give students opportunities to experience empowerment and seek a broader range of possibilities from which to make decisions, especially when they feel themselves shutting down. As their credits accumulate, students would shift their focus to plans for school and work after graduation.

Entry filed under: Drop-out, HS Re-engagement. Tags: drop-out, education, re-engagement.