Five Paths to Success

1. When Big Seems Small

In Portland's suburbs, a large high school makes every student feel counted.

By Rhonda Barton

Beaverton, Oregon—If you're waiting for the bell to ring at Southridge High School, you'll wait forever: No shrill metallic sound signals the end of the class period or the close of the school day. Instead, kids take their cues from snatches of Broadway show tunes, the strains of a classical concerto, or a rock beat blasting out of the public address system. It's one small—but telling—sign that this suburban Portland high school marches to its own drummer.

Built in 1999, Southridge doesn't look like your grandmother's high school. A soaring glass atrium crowded with round lunch tables and festooned with banners and school spirit signs sits at the center of the sprawling complex. Four brightly colored wings radiate out of this thriving hub: Each is a self-contained "neighborhood" with fewer than 500 students and its own team of teachers, counselors, and other staff members. Freshmen are randomly assigned to the neighborhoods, which function as smaller learning communities and have their own identity and governance structure.

Making It Personal

While the neighborhood serves as a student's home base for four years—the place where he takes language arts and social studies classes and is assigned to an advisory group—he'll travel all over the building for electives that fit neatly into seven career academies. As sophomores, students choose from one to three career academy "endorsements"—similar to college majors—to pursue in their junior and senior years. To earn the endorsements, students must take a set number of courses, fulfill a service learning requirement that links to community needs, and complete an independent senior project. A trimester system makes it easier to offer students lots of choices.

The blend of neighborhoods and academies—along with a number of other innovations that personalize learning—is a formula that seems to work for just about everyone. Less than 1 percent of Southridge's students dropped out last year; almost 80 percent enrolled in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses; and, in an independent survey, the average student said he was well known by at least 3.7 teachers. Southridge also met standards for adequate yearly progress in all areas but one (the exception being a single category where two students did not test).

Those results have brought Southridge widespread attention and catapulted Principal Sarah Boly into the national spotlight. Invited to speak in April 2004 at a prestigious national convention of education reporters in San Francisco, Boly told the group, "The barriers to changing schools are essentially systems that promote mediocrity and inhibit high schools from moving ahead."

Free Rein

When Boly was asked to design Southridge from the ground up, there were no such inhibitions. "I was given two documents: the floor plan of the school and Breaking Ranks" (the 1996 handbook published by the National Association of Secondary School Principals). Working with a cross-disciplinary team of 18 teachers and counselors from across the district, Boly spent a year researching, planning, and listening. "The community said, 'Give our children more options'; students said, 'Quit lecturing to us, quit boring us, let us design our own educational programming.' We simply listened."

Boly assures people that Southridge wasn't an overnight success. "The first year was chaotic," she recalls with a shudder. "I could feel us going sideways. We weren't talking about student work, we were talking about who stole the file cabinet and used up all the paper."

Despite "every single advantage in the world," including a regionally and internationally diverse staff, Boly describes the data that first year as "abysmal" with huge discrepancies in achievement among the dominant population and minority students. "It wasn't long after Columbine, so most of the data we were collecting had to do with perceptions of safety... (and) it was awful. Only about 20 percent of our students felt like teachers respected them and 7 percent felt students respected each other. It appeared that we were headed in the direction of every other new high school that had been intent on change but hadn't paid enough attention to school culture, including teacher culture."

It was a wake-up call. Boly and her staff redoubled their efforts, instituting critical friends groups and concentrating on making every student feel connected. By the fourth year, when the first class of freshmen entered their senior year, the charge to "break ranks" finally paid off in higher test scores, lower dropout rates, and a narrowing achievement gap.

Adam Barbay, a senior who started at Southridge the second year it was open, remembers, "There were lots of kinks to work out—and there still are—but there are so many opportunities here." After starring in the school's musical, Barbay is headed for Loyola University in Chicago to study theatre, physics, business, or all three. Seventy percent of his classmates will also go on to a four-year college while 20 percent pursue a two-year degree. That's an enviable record in a school with a population that's 16 percent low income and almost one-quarter minority.

"NTLB"

Boly believes that pushing students to dream—and helping them realize their dreams—can only happen in an environment where there's distributed leadership and teacher collaboration. "It's not just about No Child Left Behind: It's no teacher left behind. It's about identifying a team of teacher-leaders who can help lead the whole school," she says. English teacher Sharon Larpenteur backs that up: "Sarah has a vision, but she's able to reach out. She listens carefully to everyone's opinion and crafts a solution that works for everyone."

The ability to make things work has turned out to be a mixed blessing for Boly. Instead of retiring this year, as planned, she's been persuaded to take on the role of Beaverton's assistant superintendent. She'll face the challenge of applying some of Southridge's lessons to Oregon's second-largest school district.

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Photo by Bruce Miller