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Transcript of NTA Conference Call Presentation held on 04/30/97 Integrating Educational Reform Initiatives to Serve All YouthPresented by Mayo Hallinan Sue Tieber Rick Murphy |
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| Teri Wallace
(National Transition Alliance): Today's topic represents
a significant issue for individuals around the country.
We are excited to hear how two New American High Schools
are actively implementing whole school reform. We have
presenters from two different New American High Schools -
Rick Murphy from Walhalla High School in South Carolina,
and Sue Teiber from Gateway Institute of Technology in
St. Louis, Missouri. But before Rick and Sue present, we
will hear from Mayo Hallinan from the National Center for
Research and Vocational Education in Berkeley,
California. Mayo Hallinan (National Center for Research and Vocational Education): By way of introduction, NCRVE is a consortium of eight institutions involved in research and dissemination of information on all aspects of vocational education, from Perkins legislation to Tech Prep and school-to-work or school-to-career initiatives. The New American High School Project began out of an interest on the part of Trish McNeil, the Assistant Secretary of the Office of Vocational and Adult Education at the U.S. Department of Education. Her interest was in finding out what high schools were doing in the area of career majors, career clusters or pathways. The Department of Education and NCRVE set out in early 1996 to canvass the country looking for high schools that were involved in this kind of whole school reform. We started out by establishing a couple of baseline criteria. The first criterion was that the schools involve all students in their career program. When we talk about whole school reform, we mean that all students are included, so we decided that rather than looking at programs that were open only to a portion of the whole school's student population, we needed to look for schools that involved all students. All students would be required to select an area of interest (whether it was called a major, pathway, or academy), have certain experiences that would help them identify those interests, and have experience both in academic and technical skills related to those areas of interest. The second criterion was that these schools prepare students for both college and careers. This was to say that the distinction between students who were college bound and students who were not college bound was no longer useful. We were particularly looking at the requirements that students would fulfill while they were in high school. For instance, we were avoiding programs that require certain course sequences which preclude students from taking, say, the two years of a foreign language required to enter the four year university system in that state. With those two baseline criteria we went out looking for nominations. We received over 200 nominations from around the country. We phone screened about 65 of those to get a better sense of what that school meant by having all students engage in the career program, and also to get some demographic information. Then we selected 33 high schools to visit. On those site visits, we interviewed a focus group of students, a group of teachers, the principal, and sometimes a key contact other than the principal. We also shadowed students in academic and vocational classes and in workplace experiences. Out of all these site visits, we selected ten high schools that seem to be making significant progress in changing the way students were experiencing their education. We presented in a national conference last May in Washington, D.C. the following ten schools:
The ten showcase schools consider themselves works in progress. No one says, 'We are the model for all schools to follow.' Elements that the ten schools are addressing include having all students:
We have two of the showcase schools represented here in the teleconference call, Sue Tieber with Gateway Institute of Technology in St. Louis, Missouri, and Rick Murphy with Walhalla High School in South Carolina. With that I would like to turn it over to Sue Tieber. Sue Tieber (Gateway Institute of Technology): Gateway is a 9-12 high school serving approximately 1600 students. The students are accepted on a lottery basis, therefore we have a full range of students, including students with severe orthopedic disabilities, learning disabilities, behavior challenges, resource students and gifted students. Approximately 200 of our students have disabilities. Since Gateway is a large school, in order to work closely with students and help them feel that they belong, all of the students are in a school within a school structure. At the ninth and tenth grade level students are in Houses consisting of four teachers - one in English, social studies, math, and science - who work together with a counselor. They work as a team using integrated curriculum for approximately 85 to 100 students. Part of the ninth grade students' integrated curriculum exposes them to the career clusters of Gateway. Gateway is designed to integrate academic and technological education in career clusters that require students to have a strong background in mathematics and science. All of our students take a math curriculum that takes them through algebra, geometry, advanced algebra with college algebra, and trigonometry with analytic geometry; they all take biology, chemistry, and physics. And then going into their junior year they pick a career strand, or as we call them a major, within one of our four specialty areas:
Most of our students go on to either four year or two year colleges. The number of students going to proprietary schools following their high schools is increasing each year as they're learning more and more what the proprietary schools can offer in the technological fields, as well as the associates degrees and college credits they're now offering. Although students with disabilities may start in a self contained classroom, we integrate them into the class-within-a-class structure, where special education teachers are in the classroom with the regular education math, science, and engineering teachers. Teachers are included by helping the students with disabilities get the kind of help they might need to be successful. We have after school tutoring to meet their needs, and make it clear to students that they can always go to an adult in the building and ask for help. Words like, "I'm behind or I don't understand," are acceptable at Gateway, but, "I can't," is not. We strongly emphasize that there is a way to accomplish their goals and be successful. Additionally, we have partnerships with area businesses. Monsanto and two medical schools in St. Louis provide a great deal of assistance and internships in the area of agricultural, health and biological sciences; Mallinckrodt Chemical, in physical sciences; McDonnell-Douglas, in engineering technology; and Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, as well as the computer divisions of Monsanto, Mallinckrodt Chemical, and McDonnell-Douglas, in computer science and mathematics. Lucent Technologies staff have been very helpful to our students. Just last month, ten of our computer physics majors were able to have lunch with Bell Labs senior scientist. They're currently facilitating email conversations between these students and a Nobel physicist. That pretty well covers what Gateway does except that we do the other things that high schools do. Our young women just won the state basketball championship and were undefeated! So we're a full service high school incorporating all of the students into what we do. Teri Wallace (NTA): Great. Thank you very much Sue, and congratulations on that big win. Rick, can you provide an overview of the whole school reform initiative in Walhalla? Rick Murphy (Walhalla High School): Sure, I will share some of the activities at Walhalla High School that gave us this recognition last year, and how we're implementing whole school reform. Before I go into this I like to share the demographic context. Walhalla High School is a small rural high school with about 850 students. We're in the northwest corner of the state of South Carolina along a very industrial avenue called The Interstate 85 Corridor. We're about two hours from Atlanta, about two hours from Charlotte, and right on the fringes of an area where we have multinational companies like BMW, MICHELEN, ADIDAS and others. So we are in a fairly unique position, and the demographics, I think, are important. Before I talk about some of the strategies that Walhalla High School has been using to accomplish whole school reform, I want to go over an important point that goes beyond the activities that we do. It's more about developing a change in the mind-set of teachers, counselors, parents, students, and really the whole community that can create the school climate where all students feel that they can be successful and parents can feel like they're actually part of the process. These are very important elements to our success, but they don't come necessarily with one activity or one strategy. It takes several things in order for this philosophy to take shape: 1. A support system to help with staff development to keep up with all these new courses and methodologies that are coming along. Teachers aren't prepared for the new types of curriculum that they receive, and need access to this kind of training. 2. Community partners to feel that they have a purpose and stake in what's going on. 3. Support from our post-secondary community, both our two and four year colleges, as well as your K-8 schools, so we're all really working toward the same goals. 4. Leadership that not only has this vision, but also the patience to stay with this process, one that really does takes a long time. And this is probably the most difficult of all, because in education we go through so many short term programs, and as local, state, and national policies change, we seem to do different things. So you really have to be patient and I think if Walhalla High School has a message, it's that our longevity has kind of proved that persistence pays off. I don't think reform is necessarily a hard road, I just think that it's a real long one, and you have to be patient and persistent. Let me talk a little about Walhalla High School. We're now celebrating ten years of several intiatives. In 1987, Walhalla became South Carolina's first pilot site for the southern regional education board's High School-to-Work Program. At the same time, our community, business and education leaders from the three county area came together and formed a consortia of businesses, schools, and colleges called Partnership for Academic and Career Education (PACE). PACE was formed to support the promotion of Tech Prep and School-to-Work programs in our area. And you have to remember this is in 1987, before legislation, before funding was involved. There was true need in the community. In 1988, our own local business education partnership right here in Oconee County conducted a needs assessment of the businesses and schools to determine what support they could lend the schools. They determined at that point that they would support a project called Project Destination to better support the direction of all students into career fields and higher education. It was through this effort that the school district created my position, Career Specialist, and funded positions for both high schools and middle schools. This position is a real key for these efforts to continue and grow, because this is not a counselor or a teacher position; it's a position that's really there to help teachers, guidance counselors, students, parents, and community members understand what's going on and to be that link. And in a lot of places, that's not happening. I think we see a lot of programs that are working from the outside in, and to really have systemic change, we've got to create the changes from the inside and work out for it to really happen. You could have some successes the other way, but I think this way really creates long lasting change. So the environment at Walhalla was necessary for these changes to occur. Our principal, John Holsteder, who is still with us now, has continued to support it, and allows faculty and staff to be a part of the way things change. We have maintained a participatory style of management, where the faculty participate, buy-in, and agree to the changes before they actually take place. In around 1989, we began to replace all the general and basic classes with more challenging and applied curriculum. By 1992 we had no general or basic classes left; we were following either the applied academic or the college preparatory program. Initially there were a lot of failures, because they were tougher classes, but later, there were less, and now there are less. We adopted lots of other things, including the block or AB schedule that better accommodates the applied teaching methodologies that we're trying to incorporate in our curriculum. It also opens up a lot more opportunities for students who take these career related electives, because if we are going to ask students to do it, we must have time in their schedules. In 1993, we were trying to make the students more goal directed, but not necessarily to a specific occupation, so we created some broad thematic career majors, or clusters, where students choose their classes based on their career interests rather than an academic track or an academic option. The career majors included occupations that require a two and four year college training and other specific occupational training after. So we were able to make the assumption that all students were going to continue, without necessarily categorizing students and keeping them in these boxes. I think we have a tendency to do that in education. So with career majors, we kind of blurred those lines, recognizing the value of all work and learning. Our state department (and most department guidelines) still requires two options, Tech Prep and College Prep, but because we don't promote it that way in the student plan-book, most students don't realize which program they're in. They know they're taking classes to accomplish a goal, and in fact most students take a combination of more applied courses, but it depends upon their career choice. For example, several years ago, the consortia that we're part of had an audit and the team that came in had a lot of positive of things to say, but the only criticism that they had was that in interviewing students, they had talked to some students that didn't know if they were Tech Prep or College Prep. I remember two superintendents looking at each other and saying, "This is working!" So we're trying to blur those lines between groups of students, creating an environment where students are all working together. In 1994, South Carolina passed legislation that requires all eighth graders and their parents or guardians to sit down with school personnel and choose a career path. Because people are thinking college and careers even in the eighth grade, these majors need to be aligned and articulated with post-secondary programs. This is a pretty weak link in a lot of programs, because post-secondary personnel have seen Tech Prep and School-to-Work as primarily a secondary program, but it's more than that. If School-to-Work is seen by the post-secondary institutions as a secondary school program, then it's looked at as something less than. Some of the other things that we've done is provide our students with an incentive. Right now South Carolina only has a requirement to pass 20 units to graduate. Now that's too low, but in order to complete a career major and to receive a goal seal on their transcript, each student has to complete more than the minimum. S/he has to take an additional math course, science course, and courses in his/her career field, after which they receive a goal seal. Most students are now achieving more than they used to, plus they're taking more courses. With an AB schedule, we have 32 opportunities to take classes; there's no reason why somebody should graduate with twenty. South Carolina is now looking at legislation that would increase the minimum to 24 credits, but we still like to see our students with about 28 credits. Another supportive effort in our school is the relationship we've built with the two-year college in our area, enabling staff to teach classes to our students on campus, both in the occupational and university transfer areas. In addition, we have a one hour lunch allowing us to do things like bring in speakers. Although it's ideal to have every student involved in an off-campus activity, it's not always achievable. We make every effort to bring the real world into the school when we can't place students in internships and coops. Finally, although all ninth and tenth graders go through a career related class, we're trying to integrate career education into every academic and occupational subject. When you have stand-alone classes, career education becomes something other, and we're trying to integrate career education into every academic and occupational subject. Teri Wallace (NTA): Thank you Rick, Mayo and Sue. I'd like to open it up for questions now, so anybody with a question, go ahead. Judy Reichle (California): Could one or both of you describe a particular student in special education: how you may have set differential standards for that student, if that was necessary, what you did so that that student actually graduated through this process and program? Sue Tieber (Gateway): Generally, we do not set differential standards. Let's take a student who has been in a self-contained classroom throughout their pre-high school career. We will start them with a teacher that teaches maybe four of their classes in a self-contained room. But we have teachers that we have sent to institutes on inclusion and who are very happy to work with students in helping them adjust to being in the regular school population. We have an added advantage in high school; the most important thing for high school students is to be with their friends and to socialize. They want to do whatever is necessary to be part of the general population and not in one room with one teacher. So we take advantage of that and start them at ninth grade with some teachers who are specially trained to work with them in the regular classroom. Our goal is to have them completely included by their junior year, and we have a class within a class in several subject areas so that a student will have a special education teacher in the math, science, or engineering classroom with them learning together so that they can go to that special education teacher for any additional help. They need to meet the same standards that every other student is making. We have some students who cannot read at all. We'll provide a reader who reads the material that they must have. But we expect all the students to complete the same curriculum, and it has been very successful thus far. Rick Murphy (Walhalla HS): I think likewise, if possible, we try to include all students in those classes. We do have special education courses that supplement general education classes, and we also have classes within classes to give that extra support. Again, the one hour lunch is an ideal time to include tutoring type programs to provide extra assistance to achieve the higher demands. Judy Reichle (California): So you're saying that the special education students meet these higher standards with this type of accommodation and support? Sue Tieber (Gateway): We have only a few students we serve in addition to our regular program, the state's only secondary program for students with autism and severe orthopaedic disabilities. Within that program, there are few students with multiple disabilities who are not able to complete the regular program. These are students that may have been in a state institution. But we integrate them as much as possible; we have teachers and students who work with them. Because we have a rehab therapy program, the students in rehab therapy work closely with them. The cadets in our Airforce Junior ROTC Program have each adopted one of the students with severe orthopedic disabilities, acting as their arms and their legs in situations where they need that in order to participate. We have one young man who is not even wheelchair-bound; he must be on his back at all times. He comes to the roller-skating parties and the skating rink in his bed. So we try to include the students as much as possible, and they're very excited. With the autistic students, we know so little about autism that I think many of them may be misdiagnosed, because after they get into the general population, many of them make strides like you just can't imagine. Young people who have not spoken a word in their life come to us at age 16 or 17 and are completing the regular high school curriculum and going on to college by the time they're twenty. Sandy Hall (Wisconsin): Do either one of you get involved with supported employment? Rick Murphy (Walhalla HS): Yes, we do. We have several school-to-work type programs for all our students, but for some of the students with moderate disabilities, we have community service activities. We have shadowing programs built into their curriculum that take them into the community to shadow business and people in industry for a period of time. We have some sheltered work experiences for some of our students, but again for the most part it's not separated from what our other students have the opportunity to take advantage of. We have a couple of academies or schools-within-schools which concentrate in certain areas, such as finance and manufacturing. We have other programs that allow students to coop and work apprenticeships. So again everybody is eligible for these programs. Sue Tieber (Gateway): We have a strong community access program for students with autism and orthopedic disabilities. The veteran's hospital in the area works very closely with us. Students work in the veteran's hospital setting finding things that they're able to do. We have one or two students who are not physically capable of doing that, and we have created some work experiences within the school. This may sound very mundane, but they do feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in being able to help out in the office, labeling, stamping, and sorting mail that comes in and goes out on a regular basis. We made arrangements so that students in wheelchairs who are physically handicapped are able to do those things. Judy (California): This is the other Judy in California, and this is for Rick. You mentioned that your eighth grade students have requirements to sit down with their parents and teachers to discuss their career interests and their plans. Could you elaborate on that a bit. Are transition plans being written at that meeting or how are they pinpointing the interests of the student at that point? Rick Murphy (Walhalla HS): Yes, they are writing them, though they're writing them in pencil, and the transition plan is reviewed every year by the student, his/her parents, and a career specialist. It was put into the School-to-Work Opportunities Act that at the eighth grade students are at the conference table with their parents. Those eighth graders that are going to be coming to the high school the next year need to choose a career major. Now again, the majors are broad and very thematic. It doesn't mean that they're going to be an engineer or a nurse or a welder, but they are asked to select a field, such as health care. They may then look at careers, such as being a nurse's aid, a physician, or researcher in the medical field. Yes, we are asking them to focus at that time, and there was some fear with that, because some parents think that students are being asked to choose a career or an occupation at an early age in life. But we try to explain that it is just a way for them to get more information on careers in general, and while they're in school we try to give them more information on that career field or that broad area. This would include opportunities to shadow, hear speakers from the community over the lunch hour, etc. So it just gives them an opportunity to learn more about that. Again, some things will change every year, but we want them to have a focus. Judy (California): That's great. Thank you. Teri Wallace (NTA): I have one question, but first a comment. I certainly appreciate the honesty of the presenters. Serving all youth with disabilities can be a challenge and I think the approach we need to take is one that is respectful and acknowledges and supports an individual's interests, goals, dreams and ambitions in whatever way and with whatever creative solutions that we can find, just like with any other student in the system. I wanted to ask Sue, Rick and Mayo, what's your best piece of advice for individuals working to ensure that school-to-work systems serve all youth? What is the single most important thing that we can do to help encourage that? Rick Murphy (Walhalla High School): Well, I feel that there are a lot of good things going on. We had the opportunity to go around and see what some other sites are doing, and what I found is that having the stick-to-it attitude, staying the course, and being patient are key elements to success. I think in order for some of these things work, we've got to give them time to work and try to get the support of all the parties around us. I think as we gain that support and as other people become players in it, then it becomes easier. Teri Wallace (NTA): That's good, you had talk earlier about working from the inside out, and I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind. Change does take time and it took us a long time to get where we're at right now, so it's going to take us awhile to change it to something different, as well. How about you Sue, Mayo. Any parting words of wisdom? Sue Tieber (Gateway): I think it's really important that the students with disabilities are included in a secondary setting, particularly on the high school level. One of the biggest motivators that we're missing when we don't include them is the motivation of being with their peers and their friends. It allows them to look at themselves not so much as having limitations. I think in the past we thought about sheltering them from other students so that they didn't feel that they were limited. But when they're with the other students they try and do a lot of things that they may not, in another setting, have done. Mayo Hallinan (NCRVE): I think one of the things that we have noticed from visiting these high schools around the country is part of that commitment comes from a very deliberate and focused effort to agree on what the goals of education are supposed to be. One of the things that schools talk about in embarking on this kind of reform is the comparison with the traditional high school education and that separating students into various tracks based on what their futures were supposed to be was not appropriate. We couldn't say this student at the ninth grade is not going to college. There are lots of reasons why communities are beginning to change that view about what education ought to be doing, including the economic changes - students with high school diplomas alone are not able to find the kinds of jobs that were available twenty, thirty years ago. Training in specific occupations is also not appropriate in the economy that values continual learning and the ability to continue to learn new skills. So there is a decision to say all students really need academic and technical skills, and to say that certain students don't need practice exercising abstract concepts and application isn't useful in the same way. It's not appropriate to say that some students will not need the academic skills that are necessary for college. So I think schools really need to come to agreement on why they're trying to change the way high school education looks and the way students experience it. Teri Wallace (NTA): Thank you. I want to thank you Mayo, Sue and Rick for taking the time to coordinate and organize this conference call, and for sharing your ideas and strategies. You've all dedicated a lot of time and energy. Good luck in your continued efforts. |
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National Transition Alliance for Youth with Disabilities (NTA) conference call presentations are sponsored by the NTA and coordinated by the National Transition Network. For a copy of this or other transcripts, contact us at:
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