By JoEllen Lynch

I visited this school in May 2014 with our colleague Leah Hamilton from the Carnegie Corporation. This visit challenged me to continue to think about our need to continue to discuss what deep personalization means in a high school.

Carpe Diem Cincinnati is in its first year, 179 students registered. Its a grade 7-12 model. The staffing model in this first year includes a Principal, 5 content teachers, and grade level “coaches” who support students in the computer assisted instruction lab. Students split their day between online learning in the lab and workshops with content teachers. There is also a staff person who “intervenes” with students who are having various challenges adjusting to the model – or life.

I went there mainly thinking about learning more about how they had integrated instructional data using the standards reached in EdGenuity. I learned about the journey their students led them through this year to develop a consistent youth development system across the school to meet their needs. To their surprise, I believe it was over 60% of the students who entered 3-6 years below grade level. Many of the students transferred from other high schools and, while there, had progressed with good grades. However, many of them had never learned to read or write at grade level.

We all know that many students get passed along because they cooperate in class, rather than because they have met standards and the social competencies at the grade level. What can a school do when students arrive, test very low on an assessment, (they use the MAP test) and cannot engage in the level of coursework the staff has planned or meet the autonomy challenges of a school environment dependent on high student agency? How do we help them with both?

This is the heart of personalization – every student has a primary person now, there are clear and consistent expectations that have been developed through student engagement, all the “adults” support a respectful approach to students no matter the behavior and model the schools value for the students.

The culture of the community became a big challenge quickly. Think about it – a large room with 100 adolescents on computers who are frustrated with the rigor of the online work. What happened is expected. The staff had to think hard about the key “rules” for behavior. They came up with three. I love that its just three rules and they really were competencies. Every community member can get on board with the elegance of a simple concept.

The Principal understood her role as leader of culture, instruction, youth development, and organization. She was able to recruit staff who complemented her strengths strategically. A least one of the five was a brand new teacher. As part of continuous improvement, she was able to quickly assess with the team when their plan wasn’t working for the students and worked with them to adjust the model. Further, they were able to bring in resource room specialists for direct reading and numeracy intervention.

She is wed to data, and told me that when teachers begin to tell her what is “wrong” with a student she says: “show me the data.” Weekly, she reviews data with the teachers and the coaches from the online instruction as well as the data that teachers create in Google Docs on each workshop. The Google Docs sort by student and show were each is on the standards for that class. But the data in the three systems they use don’t integrate. So they have to look separately each week at each. No small task and clearly an important time element to plan for.

But what also told me she was a great leader were the qualities or practices I observed:

• Leading with respect, honesty, clarity, example, and empowerment. She quickly learned she could not do it all but had to grow the team.
• All the students knew her and related to her.
• She showed deep respect for all the adults as well as the students.
• She knew the data, understood the schools challenges and talked openly about them with us. (Whew – that is a big, hard one for a first year Principal.)
• The team was quickly engaged in ” course correction” and understood that they could not engage adolescents through a zero tolerance approach.
• She cared as much about the hot food served to the kids as she did the data.
• She opened her doors to us, encouraged us to talk with all the students and staff. When I asked to sit and work with a student who was really struggling she respectfully approached the student. What was amazing to me, was that the student (who had a history of disruptive behavior) engaged with me, showed me some of the remedial work she did in the adaptive learning program, and knew her assessment scores from MAP and what they meant for her. Thats real agency. She was working it. This student even trusted a new adult in her school environment to respect her.

I’m enriched by meeting her, encouraged by their courage to continue to adapt. Discouraged that the state of our technology and ability to integrate and make it easier for kids and teachers is so very challenging. I worry about this for all of our new schools. We know what a challenge this is, it will take the modeling of the openness of this leader to meet our visions. My hope is that we can be as open with our challenges with each other as she is, the questions are hard the work exhausting. Principals get tired and discouraged in the first year. We need to keep each others spirits up.