Retained 8th graders leap-frogging to head of class

Last spring, Harrison School District 2 officials told Jose Hernandez that he must repeat eighth grade.

“I was mad. I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to be with friends in high school."

He didn’t have that choice. It was either attend the district’s High School Preparatory Academy or find another school district.

Unique among local and state public schools, the program is designed to do more than improve academic growth. It is geared to boost self-confidence and self-esteem, address bad behaviors and habits, and inspire students to work toward high school graduation, college and careers, says Principal Lyn McCarty.

This type of intervention may become commonplace. This spring, the Colorado Legislature will consider a bill called the Early Literacy Act, which would give districts more teeth to insist that third-graders who can’t read proficiently be retained. It would also provide more interventions in grades K-3 and provide reading resources for teachers.

Harrison is in the forefront of such change. At the end of this school year, the district  plans to hold back up to 10 percent of not only its eighth-graders, but also third- and fifth-grade students who are not reading proficiently. They expect the total to be about 350 students.

The elementary students will remain in their schools.

The Preparatory Academy’s mission is to prepare students for high school work by emphasizing reading proficiency. “But it is more than reading,” McCarty said. “It’s getting them to want to engage in school.”

It seems to be working in Jose’s case — after a rocky start.

Evelyn Hernandez was not happy about her son Jose’s resistance to attending the academy.

She had gone to a big urban school. “I didn’t pay attention like I should have. I saw this as a chance I didn’t get.”

But in the end, she allowed Jose to go to Oklahoma to live with an aunt and attend high school there.

Within weeks, Jose had a change of heart.

“I saw I wasn’t doing good there and wouldn’t get any credits and that dropping out would be next. So I came back,” Jose explains.

Now Jose is a class leader, and his scores and learning are improving at a rapid rate.
“I even like to read now,” he says.

Evelyn Hernandez says that her 15-year-old son no longer hangs out with kids not interested in school. He looks forward to classes, comes home in a good mood, treats the family with respect, tells her about all the things he learned and brings academic awards home. He studies in the evenings.

“I’m very proud of him. There is no emotion to describe what has happened. His younger brothers are following his lead. He’s even talking about college. It’s a wonderful program.”

But for many, it has been a hard sell. Thirty-seven of the 90 students chosen for the Academy left the district last fall rather than repeat eighth grade.

Social promotion and retention are controversial issues, often fraught with emotion and embarrassment.

But it is a reality that will come to schools nationwide and in Colorado as districts scramble to live up to federal mandates to increase graduation rates and better prepare kids for college and workplace.

“It’s a hard choice and some parents don’t like it. But instead of being upset at the district, they need to work with us to get their children caught up,” said D-2 School Board President Deborah Hendrix.

A parent can appeal, but “just because they don’t like it, isn’t a good reason,” she says. “We will work with them with intervention. But if that doesn’t work, it’s retention.”

It’s not illegal to hold children back. Colorado is a choice state, so students who refuse to be held back can to go to another district.

The Harrison board and superintendent feel so strongly that retention works that they are prepared to lose money. School districts in Colorado receive money from the state based on the number of students enrolled. Harrison, which gets about $6,411 per pupil,  lost about  $237,000 when those 37 students left the district. There are also additional costs to run the school.

“We predict that some will say no and go to neighboring districts,” Superintendent Mikes Miles said. “We are willing to take the financial hits because at the end of the day, we have to do what is right for kids.”

Hendrix agrees. “If we don’t do this then we continue to put kids in jeopardy of being illiterate.”

The board and Miles are accustomed  to controversy as they have strived to turn around the once chronically underperforming district, where more than 70 percent of the 11,300 students are impoverished and many are at risk of dropping out. They have fired under-performing teachers, gotten off academic probation, improved CSAP scores. The graduation rate in 2011 was 72 percent, after years in the 60s. Two years before the state instituted a similar mandate statewide, Harrison, amid controversy, set in place a pay for performance system that makes teachers more accountable by compensating based on how well students do.

Harrison administrators have no illusions that widespread retention will be easy. But they predict community acceptance as the practice spreads, as families better understand the value and as High School Preparatory Academy parents and students talk up the successes. The students held back will be tracked through high school.

Retention is sometimes called “the gift of time,” to lend dignity to the intervention. In Harrison, there were several reasons some parents and students looked that gift horse in the mouth: kids wanted to participate in high school athletics (ignoring the fact that their grades might not allow that); they didn’t want an extra year of school, and they wanted to move ahead with their friends.

The parents that dug in their heels were holding onto traditional expectations that, regardless of readiness, their kids would progress.

“Retention was a shift in thinking that they weren’t accustomed to,” says McCarty. “Most changes of this type take three to five years of transition.”

Students were chosen for the academy based not just on grades and test scores, but on their potential to benefit from it. (For example, those with special needs, some non-English speaking students and others were kept in more appropriate intensive programs in their schools.)

Located at the Gorman Education Center north of Harrison High School on Circle Drive, it has an atmosphere of academic seriousness. The students dress in uniforms, khakis or black slacks, and polo shirts.

Classrooms are separated by gender, because studies have found that the sexes learn differently and girls particularly learn better in their own classrooms.

Classroom doors are locked for five minutes after class starts so that laggards must go to the principal’s office for a pass. Few are tardy now.

The school mascot is the molecule, underlining the academic focus.

There are field trips to colleges and vocational schools to show kids what the future can look like.

Classes include two 55-minute sessions of math (core and intervention); two of language arts (literature, reading and writing), plus reading intervention and high school health.

Those who are near proficient in reading are taking an advanced 21st Century literacy class this semester for high school credit.

Besides that classwork, 12 students of varying aptitudes are participating in After School University, a pilot program in the same building. Paid for by a grant, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs graduate students provide tutoring in accelerated math and advanced computer programming. Each teacher has two students. The eighth-graders receive high school credit, and just as important, “it shows them what can be done with math to get 21st Century jobs,” McCarty notes.

When the High School Preparatory Academy got under way in August, eight students were reading at second grade level. Others were underperforming to the extent that they likely would have failed in high school work.

Why were these students so far behind?

Hendrix notes that some are transient students who came in behind and were challenged to get caught up. But the district’s old ways of doing things also contributed.

“We are also looking very hard at what we are doing as a staff. Those students who have been with us from the first, why aren’t they proficient?”

The district has tackled that with extra training and mentoring of teachers, classroom critiques, more interventions, parental involvement and curriculum changes.

“We are trying to move everyone forward at least a year and a third in any given school year,” Hendrix says.

In anticipation of retention of third-, fifth- and eighth-graders this spring, the district is redoubling its attention to those things and encouraging summer school classes to increase proficiency.

Many of the students arrived at the Academy believing that they couldn’t do the work because they hadn’t been successful in the past, McCarty notes.

To counter that, there has been great emphasis on boosting what is called “academic resiliency” or the ability to stick with it and not give up.

Some students have significant life challenges – poverty, family issues, frequent moves, parents who are absent because they working two or three jobs, living in gang and drug environments.

There are also “well being” issues — coming to school hungry, fatigue, headaches and other stress related health problems that interfere with learning.

Students who are academically behind often develop coping mechanisms to hide it, such as acting out or checking out mentally, emotionally giving up.  

“They have a lot of fear,” McCarty says. “We asked them whether it was harder to learn or act out. They find it less fearful to act out than to learn.”

All the students take physical education in the form of Taekwondo martial arts to build mental strength and self esteem.

They also attend a class that uses Success Highways, a program that builds confidence, motivates, deals with stress, and expands social connections with teachers, home and others so the students know “someone is in their corner,” McCarty explains.

“We know every student personally, they aren’t just faces in the crowd.”

They may move the academy to a wing of Harrison High School next year, so the students aren’t isolated and get a feel for high school and interacting with successful students role models. The academy also might end the gender separated classes. While it benefits girls somewhat, it doesn’t so much for the boys. And the cost of doubling up on teachers is a factor.

On a recent morning, teacher Kasey Andrade Smith was leading a class discussion on courage. The kids explained what it meant to them — standing up for themselves, learning new things, helping someone in trouble.

At the end of the session, she gave them homework of sorts, “meet one new person.”
Smith came to Harrison because she wanted to make a difference in an urban school.

“It’s been challenging, it’s not just teaching. It’s dealing with everything else, too. For some overwhelmed kids, school has been at the bottom of things they had to deal with in their lives.”

While teaching them academics are important, just as vital is “showing them I care,” she added. “Mentoring is something many of them have not had, someone to help them see where they want to go in life.”

Most challenging is that many students have learned tricks to sidetrack themselves when the going gets tough, she says. So, they talk a lot about perseverance.

“My fear is always that they will leave before I can help them change, ”Smith says.

One student was expelled because of  behavior problems. “I still wonder if I could have done more. I know we can’t help them if they can’t help themselves and I know we can’t save them all. But still it is gutwrenching.”

Then there are students like 14-year-old Jade Spradling who has blossomed both academically and socially.

Her mother, Eva Parks, says, “I was angry at first because I had thought she was being cheated by not going on to high school. And I was afraid the classes would be filled with a bunch of bad kids.”

But it was none of that, she says. “It’s a blessing in disguise. It’s helped her confidence, and she’s not so shy. She reads a lot more, every night, and we are dedicated to homework. She has all As and Bs. I’m thankful she is in the program. “

Jade, too, said she was upset when she was told she would have to be retained a year. “But I knew I needed help with reading, and so I just decided to go with it. It’s fun and the teachers are nice and I’m learning new stuff.”

And best of all she says, “I didn’t think about college before. Now maybe I’d like to go to Yale. It’s a good school.”

Her reading ability skyrocketed from fifth grade level to 11th grade in the first semester.

Other students are showing success, too.

By the end of the first semester in December results on the Degrees of Reading Power (an assessment commonly used nationwide) showed that of the students remaining in the program: 14 percent advanced by more than four years; 22 percent showed three to  four years growth; 31 percent advanced two to three years; and 33 percent advanced as much as two years.  

“In that time, students should have gained at least a half a year, and we had no one that gained less than one and a half years,” McCarty said.

“It is huge for the kids,” McCarty says. “They are taking responsibility for their learning.”

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