Grand Valley High School community (Used with permission)
 

Here is the fifth in a series of profiles about the winners of a pilot project called Schools of Opportunity, which is highlighting schools that are creating healthy environments for students, teachers and staff. Seventeen schools were named as inaugural winners in initiative to identify and recognize public high schools that seek to close opportunity gaps through practices “that build on students’ strengths” — not by inundating them with tests. (You can see the list here.)

Each high school recognized as 2015 Schools of Opportunity has supported and challenged its students — many of them at-risk — and its teachers, but each story is unique. The first story featured how Colorado’s Centaurus High School fosters a healthy climate for students and teachers. The second profile looked at how one majority-minority school on Long Island, Malverne High School, fosters a college-going culture and builds academic and social-emotional supports around students who need them. The third profile looked at Colorado’s Jefferson County Open School, which has refused to conform to standardization. The fourth looked at a school that refuses to allow student learning to be driven by high-stakes tests and that attends to the health of the minds of students as well as their physical health.

The Schools of Opportunity project is the work of Carol Burris, who is retiring as principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in New York, and Kevin Welner, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s School of Education who specializes in educational policy and law. Burris was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, was named New York State High School Principal of the Year. She is taking early retirement at the end of the school year to advocate for public education. Welner is director of the National Education Policy Center at UC Boulder, which produces high-quality peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions.

You can visit the project’s website at opportunitygap.org. Here is the fifth profile of a winning school.

Grand Valley High School
Parachute, CO
Enrollment: 280
Principal: Ryan Frink
Superintendent of Schools: Ken Haptonstall
Economically disadvantaged students: 45 percent

By Kevin Welner and Carol Burris

Grand Valley High School is located on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, in a small town called Parachute. The high school has built a robustly integrated system of high expectations, challenging curriculum, universal access, and strong supports. It includes an AP-for-all approach, but this is just the start.

Principal Ryan Frink explains that the school turned to Advanced Placement courses as a way to put in place a “consistent, rigorous curriculum” for the school’s students from year to year. The 2014-2015 school year was GVHS’s third since the implementation of AP-for-all. What this means is that all ninth-graders take AP Human Geography and AP Environmental Science; all sophomores take AP U.S. History and AP Biology; all juniors take AP U.S. Government and AP English Literature; and all seniors take AP Macroeconomics. Other AP courses offered are AB Calculus, AP Statistics, AP English Language, AP Microeconomics, AP Chemistry, and AP Computer Science.

The AP focus places considerable demands on students and teachers, but the change was important and beneficial. In the recent past, the school had few truly challenging classes.

“Not only is the [AP] curriculum built with fidelity,” Principal Frink told us, “the system provides intense professional development for our teachers to ensure the teacher is solid in the understanding of the outcomes.”

Teacher development, in fact, is another key part of Grand Valley High School’s excellence. Working with the Colorado Education Initiative, the school’s teachers have attended several summer AP-related trainings plus professional developments during the school year. Each new teacher is also paired with a mentor teacher to provide instructional and other support. They meet on a regular basis and document student learning. Once a month, the mentor and new staff member also meet with all the other pairs in the school and the district, to discuss successes and areas that need more focus.

But the most impressive elements involve the supports provided within the school. Veteran teachers are observed by administrators and by other teachers with diverse levels of experience, and this generates dialogue on pedagogy and practice. Pairs of teachers who observe one another are created with the deliberate aim of helping both teachers work collaboratively on personal and professional goals and growth needs.

Grand Valley High School also has strong professional learning communities, run and lead by teachers, focused on instruction and thoughtfully integrating the school’s response-to-intervention (RTI) protocol and advisory system (every student has an advisor and meets in the advisory for at least 30 minutes a day). The staff meets regularly every other Monday to discuss specific students brought to the attention of the school’s RTI team. During PLC meetings, staff members meet as a whole and share approaches that are working and not working, and they also meet in content teams to review curriculum, common assessments, and department goals.

A leadership team also meets, in order to review current practices and provide guidance to the rest of the teachers. For instance, this group met, without administration, and developed a systematic approach to maintain grade books and communicate student learning to students and parents. Relatedly, the school makes excellent use of technology – tablet computers, laptops, Google Classroom, YouTube, and other platforms and devices – always using the technology as a tool, not a goal or a magical talisman.

Principal Frink described the school’s philosophy as follows:

“Each student comes into a class with varying skill levels; it is our duty to find the entry point for all students and provide them the opportunity to grow their skills around central concepts. This is what we call a growth mindset. The students are provided feedback in two major categories: content and responsibility. This provides a more accurate view of the student to the educators, so we can begin to recognize if there are deficiencies in their knowledge or the behaviors towards reaching their goals.

“Our team of educators uses this information to meet as a group, via RTI, and discuss what students need to be more successful. This essentially creates individual educational plans for every student with the mindset that we can all get better. The overarching goal is to send kids from GVHS into a community in which they desire to live with the mindset to accept responsibility, reject passivity, lead courageously, and expect the greater reward.”