By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter
The struggle to prevent high school dropouts is won or lost early. Senior or junior year may be the most active fronts in the fight to keep kids in school, but the most strategically crucial battleground is years earlier — with freshmen, even though thoughts of donning a cap and gown can be the furthest thing from their minds.
“Ninth grade is where we’re losing them. If they don’t have success their freshmen year, they go on to not graduate and be a dropout,” said Margaret Griffin, counselor at Skyview High School.
Skyview is instituting several changes next year, some aimed at setting students off on the right foot as freshmen, and others at providing more opportunities for engagement and real-world relevancy as they continue their march toward a diploma — whether that diploma be from high school, college or some other post-secondary opportunity.
Doing so requires a new view of education at Skyview.
“Skyview is trying to become unique and different and offer other opportunities for students. We’re trying to give them a lot of alternatives,” said Principal Randy Neill.
The changes start with the freshmen. Next fall the ninth grade will be more isolated from the rest of the school and kept as a more cohesive class, rather than dispersed into the sea of upperclassmen. An area of an upstairs wing will be designated as the ninth-grade house, with all freshmen lockers and classes grouped together. Four teachers and one special education teacher will be dedicated just to the ninth grade for the first four class periods of the day, and they’ll have planning time together so they can collaborate on cross-curricular activities. A science project could include a research paper, which would be worked on in English class, for instance.
“They can do group projects and thematic units. Every kid will have the same four teachers, so if anybody has a problem, there’s a cohesive, supportive learning environment for them. That’s what we want, so they can make connections with those students,” Neill said.
The freshmen program also involves an online career development component, where students explore fields that interest them and start learning what opportunities are out there and how they can go about pursuing them.
“We’re really trying to get them thinking about the future, and not just their current day, as teens tend to do,” Griffin said.
“It’s not a huge pressure situation,” Neill said. “It’s, ‘What are you guys interested in?’ and getting them to think about it a little.”
The career preparation component will be carried through the rest of the grades with expanded college credit opportunities, particularly in technology courses. Skyview already offers three levels of computer applications, desktop publishing, commercial publishing, AutoCAD and accounting classes where students can earn high school and college credits at the same time. Next year the tech department is adding software design, computer animation and Web programming and hopes to add digital photography for dual credit, as well. The classes are computer-based and self-paced, so students can work through them at school as well as at home after school or even over the summer. The classes are taught at Skyview with a curriculum that’s been approved by Kenai Peninsula College. That way, college freshmen from Skyview will have already taken the beginning-level courses and can start off in college with more advanced offerings.
“They would just as soon those kids come over and take their upper-level computer courses and not be bored,” said Darren Jones, technology teacher at Skyview.
Even freshmen can accrue college credit for the technology classes, at a cost of $25 per credit, Jones said. Skyview students can earn up to 19 college credits with technology classes alone, he said.
The school also is starting what it’s calling a career jump program next year, where Skyview students take distance-delivery KPC introductory math and English classes at Skyview. Students will enroll in the online KPC classes, just like any college student would, but will have a teacher at Skyview to help them through the material.
The program is a variation of Jump Start and AP programs, suited to the diversity of Skyview’s student population. In AP classes, students take an exam at the end of an advanced-level high school class, and if they score high enough they don’t have to take the same, beginning-level class in college. But they don’t get college credit for it, either. In Jump Start, high school juniors and seniors can take classes at KPC for a reduced tuition rate, and earn dual high school and college credit. With career jump, students earn dual credit and take advantage of the reduced Jump Start college credit rate, but they have a high school teacher to help them during the school day, and they don’t have to go to the college to take the class.
“We have a lot of kids that are athletes, or what have you, that have practices or jobs. They aren’t really able to access that Jump Start program as much as they would if they didn’t have to leave campus. There’s a whole other population of kids from Cooper Landing and Kasilof who take the buses. Transportationwise, they can’t get to the college,” Griffin said.
Griffin said her goal is to expand the program so Skyview students can get a full two semesters worth of college credits while still in high school, which hopefully will boost the number of students going on to post-secondary opportunities, she said.
“I think if we have a lot of the courses offered here in their comfort zone and they have success, that will lead to more kids going to college,” Jones said. “Kids are scared of college. For a lot of kids with low self-esteem, or because their parents never went to college, they think they can’t go to college. I think that that’s where we’re going to start seeing a lot of success. If kids get an A or B in a college English class (in high school), they say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t too bad. It was a lot of work, but I can do this.’”
Neill said the school is also instituting an online credit recovery program called Skyview Soar. Students can go to a portable classroom outfitted as a computer lab and staffed with a teacher throughout the day to work on finishing classes they fell behind in, taking a course they need to graduate but couldn’t fit into their schedule, or working ahead on classes they’d like to take independently. Neill said the program is a way for students who didn’t quite complete a class to not fall behind in credits and not have to take the entire class over again, which is one of the contributing factors to dropouts.
“Next year they take the same exact class from day one, and then we wonder why they don’t want to come to school anymore,” Jones said. “I really think this is going to help the dropout rate. … Those really are the kids who are going to drop out. We are putting our thumb on them to finish the course, to master the subject and move on. We’re not accepting failure. On the other hand, we have kids who are driven and want to work their way through college. This is a great system for them.”
Skyview will still have the traditional elements of a high school — regular class periods, grades, eligibility checks, sports and elective classes, but these changes are a way of allowing more flexibility for students, Neill said. Sort of molding the school to fit the needs of its students, rather than expecting students to fit the mold of a traditional high school format.
“It’s more a reaction to what we have in our current population,” Griffin said. “Our population is so unique and different from other populations in high schools because, geographically, we are so spread out, from Kasilof to Cooper Landing and everywhere in between.”
Neill said the school isn’t getting more teachers or resources to make the changes, just restructuring what it already has. The programmatic staffing formula implemented the previous year, which resulted in more teachers, interventionists and counselors throughout the district, helped make this possible, he said, and the school is being set up for wireless Internet access this summer, which helps with the technology piece.
The ultimate purpose of the more flexible, individualized, career-oriented and technology-laden approach is meant to better prepare kids for the changing world beyond high school, but doing so will help Skyview, as well. If the new programs are successful, they could boost the school’s graduation rate, which is a goal the Kenai Peninsula School District Board of Education has set districtwide. The district’s overall graduation rate was 73 percent in the 2007-2008 school year. Skyview’s rate was 75.6 percent in 2007-2008, up from 73.6 percent in 2006-2007, 69.7 percent in 2005-06, 69.2 percent in 2004-05 and 64.9 percent in 2003-04.
Neill said he also hopes the new programs boost Skyview’s flagging enrollment numbers.
Skyview’s enrollment numbers over the past decade have declined at a quicker pace than Soldotna High School or the district overall. In the 1998-1999 school year, Skyview had 637 students. By 2008-2009 it had lost 180. SoHi was at 590 students 10 years ago and had 540 this year, a decline of about 8 percent, versus Skyview’s 28 percent drop. The decline in KPBSD enrollment overall for those 10 years was about 10 percent.
The district’s declining enrollment has motivated two school consolidations already on the central peninsula, and Skyview’s name regularly comes up in speculation of which school may be next.
That conversation is not an active one at this point, said Steve Atwater, the district’s soon-to-be superintendent — starting July 1 — and current assistant superintendent of instruction.
“If the numbers dropped significantly lower, it would come back on the table, but it’s not like we’re holding our breath for this to happen,” Atwater said. “But I think the big piece is we don’t want two high schools to look the same. We want them to have their own identities to get kids to come there.”
“We’re competing with changing times,” Jones said. “A lot of the kids we want to get back here. Some of the homeschool kids, the traditional model, they didn’t like too well, and that’s why they’re doing homeschool. This way they have flexibility. If they want to come in and do part of the day here, it’s really easy. We want to accommodate them. We want to do what’s best for kids and kids’ needs have changed over the years.”
