In The News: NHS drops small school format

Scheduling will be more flexible and student support structures will be centralized, including the creation of counseling and student support centers

The 2014-2015 school year will be the last in the era of small schools at Newberg High School.

Principal Mark Risen, who has been tasked with reshaping the school to better serve its students, announced several major organizational changes that will take place for the 2015-2016 school year March 20 in his weekly Newberg Nation newsletter.

“Part of the reason we brought him in was because of his big-picture thinking,” Superintendent Kym LeBlanc-Esparza said. “That’s really a charge that we gave him, to build culture, build community, build relationships, get to know what works at Newberg High School and where the challenges are, then come to us and make a recommendation to us, what does it need to look like? How can you get us where we want to go, which is making Newberg High School a world-class high school.”

Risen told the Newberg school board in February that NHS would abandon scheduling by small school in favor of a whole-school approach and received the support of the district administration.

Constructing the schedule using a single pool of 70-plus teachers, as opposed to four pools of about 17 instructors per small school, gives NHS more flexibility in staffing, which in turn will allow them to both schedule teachers more efficiently and offer a wider variety of courses.

That decision ultimately led to the dissolution of small schools because, according to Risen, student support systems are organized around the schedule.

Counselors, for instance, will no longer be organized by small school. Rather, beginning with the incoming class of freshmen in the fall, they will be assigned alphabetically according to the last name of students.

Freshmen, sophomores and juniors will continue to be paired with their current small-school counselors for the rest of their career at NHS and the entire school will phase into the new system over three years.

Consequently, all of the student support systems, including counseling, behavioral management, attendance and various secretarial functions will be physically consolidated into one main office at the school, much like what was done with administrators and several secretaries entering this school year.

Specifically, a counseling center will be established in what is now the Silver School office, while a student support center will occupy the Silver School lounge.

All student services, including a secretary dedicated only to attendance, will be located centrally, providing students and parents with one-stop shopping, so to speak, and eliminating the need for small school offices.

Risen said the changes do not mean that NHS is abandoning its commitment to providing the personalized learning experience that was the hallmark of the small-school format, but simply organizing its resources to deliver it in a different way.

For example, much of the student support that was delivered in the small-school community will now be organized by grade level.

Students will continue to have the same advisory teacher and counselors for all four years, but they will be joined by teachers and administrators to form grade-level teams.

Risen will also institute student support teams, comprised of various stakeholders that transcend grade-level, that “will be available when we feel we simply need to get everyone around the table and talk about how we are going to help a student in need.”

The advisory program will also undergo some changes, including grade-level curriculum changes, especially for freshmen and seniors. The former will learn academic and social skills to help smooth out the transition into high school, while the latter will focus on connecting to their post-secondary education and career opportunities.

Those curriculum changes for incoming ninth-grade students are part of a yearlong program for students and parents that Risen is calling “the Freshman Experience,” which kicked in with a successful Freshman Night attended by 450 students and parents earlier this month.

In addition, two advisory periods each week will now be dedicated to academic support. With all teachers freed from teaching advisory curriculum, students (with permission) can visit with specific content-area teachers for help, including with homework.

Unburdened by the small school structure, NHS is also creating stronger content departments (science, math, English, etc.) to better collaborate on curriculum planning.

Risen has also created an instructional leadership team to provide professional development that will complement those curricular efforts and help prepare the school for the upcoming Smarter Balanced state tests.

LeBlanc-Esparza said she believes that the switch to small schools served its intended purpose at the time it was implemented, but that “where we are now is a very different place than where we were six or seven years ago.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that it won’t carry on the lessons it’s learned from that experience as it focuses on primary priorities of increasing the graduation rate, closing the essential skills and achievement gaps between various groups at the school, providing post-secondary connections to college and careers, and ensuring that it challenges its students in relevant and rigorous ways.

“We’ve got a culture of staff and kids that want to be united,” she said. “And because of our small-school experience we’re really able to play on that and still make a personalized learning experience happen for kids through the way in which we structure kids’ schedules, advisories and all those kinds of things without sectioning off our school into four small schools. I think we actually are going to see the benefit of the last seven years in the next iteration of what Newberg High School is going to be.”

Written by: Seth Gordon