To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser

Back to Graphic Version

Forward Motion

By Bracken Reed
Photos by John Reddy

Concern about graduation rates sparks an ongoing, systemic high school reform effort in Montana’s capital city.

HELENA, Montana—Talking over lunch at a restaurant in Helena’s Last Chance Gulch, Superintendent Bruce Messinger sums up the major dilemma facing the city’s three high schools. “Our challenge, as with all high schools in America right now,” says Messinger, “is how do we make school engaging and challenging for students that are high achieving and also reach out to those students who are struggling and are really disenchanted with the whole experience? We’re finding that we have to be more flexible and more personal in our approach.”

In Helena, that question has a new urgency. Helena High School, one of the district’s traditional grade 9–12 schools, did not meet the state’s graduation rate benchmark of 80 percent for two years in a row. In 2003, the school’s graduation rate was 75.4 percent. In 2004, it was 74.4. In 2005 it rose to 80.9, but the school remains in improvement status.

“It’s a statistic we’ve been paying a lot of attention to,” Messinger says, “and at the same time we’re looking at failure rates within classes, because to us the graduation rate is more like the effect, not the cause. Yes, we’re losing 20 to 25 percent of the students before they graduate, but it isn’t like they just woke up one day and said, ‘I think I’ll drop out of high school.’ There were obviously things going on that led to that.”

Identifying and addressing those causes has become a major initiative for the Helena School District. “We’ve done a pretty good job at serving students at the higher end and more in the middle,” says Messinger, “and we need to continue to challenge those students and to offer them opportunities like AP courses and internships and the chance to earn college credit. But we also need to figure out how to make the system responsive to the needs of all students.”

A Question of Values

According to Helena High Principal Greg Upham, a pivotal moment in Helena’s high school reform effort came at a national Model Schools conference in the summer of 2005. Many of the schools that presented at the conference were from large, urban districts with radically different demographics than those in Montana. What they had to say, however, hit home. “The schools I had the opportunity to listen to were schools that said, ‘We’re not going to let our students fail anymore—period, end of story,’” says Upham. “That sounds like a really simple message, but the implications, when we thought about it, were really profound.”

Back in Helena, district- and building-level administrators compared that message to their own approach. “What we realized is that we were unconsciously operating on a different set of assumptions,” says Upham, “and those were based on really deep-rooted values.”

As a predominantly middle-class community, Upham says, Helena is unapologetic about its traditional American values. “It’s the idea that you reap what you sow—that if you get up and go to school on time and work hard, then good things will happen,” says Upham. “And there’s something to be said for that. But on the other hand, it was kind of saying, ‘Well, if 20 percent of the students fail, that must be what they deserve.’”

Changing those basic values wasn’t the point, says Upham. The district simply needed to acknowledge that not all students come from the same starting point or thrive in the same kind of conditions. “Middle-class people usually know how to maneuver the system,” say Upham, “but the students that typically end up at risk don’t. Given some extra help or some different options, they can succeed, and it’s our responsibility to see that they do. We needed the flexibility to do that—we were extremely reactive to things instead of proactive.”

Messinger and the Helena Public Schools Board of Trustees agreed. That fall the district began its high school initiative in earnest. For the first half of the school year all middle and high school principals—including the principal of the alternative high school called the Project for Alternative Learning (P.A.L.)—met with Messinger and other district administrators every Wednesday afternoon for several hours. They looked at data, identified problems, and searched for solutions. They researched national reform efforts and talked about how they related to the district’s needs. They underwent Breaking Ranks training—a model designed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals to specifically address the needs of high school leaders undertaking reform.

By midterm, the group had expanded to include vice principals and members of the board, and had become a formal, district-level high school planning team. High school teachers joined the planning process to help form a larger, more representative group. The board then facilitated a series of candid discussions, asking principals about their frustrations and challenges. This was followed in the spring by a formal report of the planning team to the board.

What emerged from all of this “stage setting,” as Messinger calls it, was a dual approach. First, the team identified a few immediate, site-specific strategies and programs. Second, they suggested that the initiative needed to be long term and systemic. The conversation needed to go deeper and the circle needed to widen. Team members realized they needed to hear from students, parents, teachers, and community members. They needed to stop talking and start listening. “And that’s when we called Bob,” says Messinger.

Bob is Bob Chadwick, a nationally known consultant and facilitator who specializes in consensus building. A burly man with a full white beard, Chadwick worked for the U.S. Forest Service for nearly 30 years. While there he gained a reputation as a rare person who could find common ground among private industry, the government, and environmental groups. Chadwick eventually left the Forest Service and expanded his conflict resolution work to all areas of public life.

Breaking the Fall

While Chadwick helped the district work toward long-term change, Upham took the reins of Helena High and implemented the more immediate, site-specific reforms. In the fall of 2006 the school adopted a comprehensive intervention framework—called “the ladder of academic intervention”—and began two safety-net programs to break the fall of failing students.

The goal of these programs comes straight from the lessons Upham learned at the Model Schools conference. “Our common vision is that we’re just not going to allow students to fail,” says Upham. “We’re trying to be proactive about addressing students’ needs, which includes identifying those needs as soon as possible.”

Improving communication between the middle and high schools was essential. Before the start of the current school year, Upham and his vice principals met with middle school staff to identify incoming freshmen who were at risk of failing.

“It’s all about getting to know the students,” says Upham. “We’ve made a point of saying that we can no longer let 350 to 400 students enter our building every fall and not know who they are.”

After looking at the data and talking to the middle school staff, Upham personally contacted the parents of almost two dozen students. “It was positive outreach,” says Upham. “It wasn’t calling to say ‘your kid is bad, they’re flunking.’ It was saying: ‘We think we have a program that can help your student. It’s not special education, and you don’t have to do it, but we strongly encourage that you do it.’”

That new program is called Late Start and draws on the research of Kyla Wahlstrom and her team at the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI) at the University of Minnesota. Their research shows that many adolescents’ “clocks” don’t kick in until later than most adults, often around 10 in the morning.

Both Helena High and Capital High (which started the program a year earlier) decided to combine a late start with intensive, small-group instruction. To make it work, they deferred two of the normal freshman classes to the sophomore year, and identified math as the greatest area of need.

The students arrive at 9:45 a.m. and have breakfast with a counselor who talks with them about social skills. At 10:05 they begin a full period of math instruction, breaking into smaller groups according to their appropriate instructional level. “That kind of level-appropriate instruction is often done in elementary schools,” says Upham, “but in middle and high school, kids are typically expected to sink or swim. We decided that we needed to start these kids where they were, rather than where they should be. They needed a chance to do well and to gain confidence so they could move forward.”

And move forward they have. “We’re seeing some kids have success that have never had any success at all,” says Upham. “These are students who failed almost all their classes in the seventh and eighth grade, and now they’re working hard and they’re building some momentum.”

The Late Start program is a targeted intervention that typically serves 20 or fewer students. To meet the needs of other freshman and sophomore students who are struggling but require less intensive interventions, the school has implemented a credit recovery program. Students who are falling behind in a subject are taken out of the regular classroom and given small group or even one-on-one instruction with a veteran teacher. When they catch up, they can return to the regular classroom.

Dave Thennis, who teaches a credit recovery biology class, says the results have been inspiring. “I think there are several reasons for the success,” says Thennis. “They’re less distracted. They’re able to basically work at their own pace and in their own way. They’re in a room with only three or four other students, so they can focus better. And I think it makes it much clearer as to what’s being asked of them—they can visualize it and cross things off as they go.”

But perhaps the main reason for the students’ success, says Thennis, is their recognition that someone cared. “I think they really get that concept: We’re going to give you another shot because we want you to succeed,” he says. “They appreciate that and that appreciation is showing up in their engagement in the process. They come in with smiles on their faces and say ‘I got it done!’ It’s a complete role reversal for some of these kids.”

According to Messinger, the reforms at Helena High have one thing in common. “We’re trying to make the system more flexible and responsive to individual needs,” he says. “It’s about trying to personalize the educational experience. In the past, the system was maybe too tightly structured, too inflexible. We’re starting to change that in small ways, while working on a more systemic reform.”

Continuing the Conversation

The work of the planning team, with the help of Chadwick, is essential to those larger reforms. After meeting with the board, Chadwick recommended a series of “listening sessions,” that would include at least one session for each stakeholder group. He also recommended that the team recruit participants who wouldn’t typically get involved—students who aren’t the usual high achievers and parents who haven’t participated in the past.

Two students who are high achievers—Dawson, a junior at Capital High, and Hannah, a senior at Helena High—have been central to the process. The two serve as the student representatives on the board of trustees, as well as on the high school planning team, which gives them a unique perspective on the district’s reform efforts.

“It’s been a really exciting year to serve as a student representative,” says Dawson. “A lot of the focus has been on the high school level, which makes our role even more important.”

Both Dawson and Hannah have worked hard to recruit students for the listening sessions that represent a broad cross-section of the student population. “If we’re trying to make the system more open and responsive to everyone then we really need to include the students that aren’t traditionally successful,” says Dawson.

“This is about bringing students and parents and teachers and administrators all to the same level,” says Hannah. “We want to give everyone a voice and a sense of empowerment—that their input is valuable and will be listened to, and that action will come from that.”

The listening sessions will be held in February with multiple sessions for different stakeholder groups at each of the three high schools and a community session for others who are interested but not closely associated with the schools. Where the high school initiative goes from there will be greatly influenced by what the district hears.

“We hope these sessions can build trust, which will lead to buy-in on the actual strategies we propose,” says Messinger. “We’re not going in saying ‘Here’s what we want to do, what do you think?’ We’re asking them for ideas and giving them a voice in what we do, so that when we actually propose some major changes they will have support.”

Seeing results is essential, says Hannah, especially for students who are already skeptical of the system. “Listening to those students is great,” she says, “but if we don’t do anything after that, then it’s just going to make the situation worse. They’re going to feel even less empowered and like it was just the same old thing. This is such a great opportunity to prove that they really do have a voice and that change really can be made. It’s crucial that we not only listen, but take action.”

In Helena, the stage is set and the action is just beginning, but one thing is clear: How things play out from here isn’t the sole right or responsibility of the board, the central administration, the building principals, or any other single group to decide. Here, everyone has a say, so that all can succeed.

By the numbers: Helena School District

For more information: www.helena.k12.mt.us