Dramatic and positive change is moving forward in the Marysville School District. It’s aimed just where it needs to be: getting more students to succeed at higher levels.
Superintendent Larry Nyland’s effort to create “small learning communities” for the district’s high school students by next fall is taking shape. Marysville-Pilchuck High School’s staff voted last month for a plan that will create six separate schools: a broadly-based “Pathways” school for up to 1,200 students, and five themed schools for about 400 students each – a Tech Academy, School for the Entrepreneur, Bio-Med Academy, School of Communications and a Global Connections school. When the district’s new high school opens in 2010 or 2011, roughly half of the small schools will move there.
Work on developing them began in earnest this week, with early-release days giving staff time in the afternoon to get down to detailed planning. Major change, of course, is hard. Some are embracing it, some are resisting. Still others – teachers, parents and students among them – are approaching it with an understandable mix of optimism, caution and good questions.
Smaller learning communities aren’t brand new – Mountlake Terrace and Mariner high schools made the conversion in 2003, and more 2,000 large, comprehensive high schools are moving to some model of small communities nationwide. Some are showing quick improvement, some are struggling. Much is being learned about what works and what doesn’t, and Marysville can take advantage of that.
M-P Principal Tracy Suchan Toothaker knows a thing or two about smaller learning communities, having launched the Mariner conversion while she was principal there. In a newsletter to staff last week, she noted that smaller schools don’t succeed automatically, but by allowing other good practices that set the stage for success. Her message: Greater collegiality among smaller groups of teachers and more personalized teacher-student relationships can lead to more rigorous, accountable work and better learning. Discipline and dropout rates, it is hoped, will drop, and attendance will rise.
The clear need for improvement is why Nyland is leading this change. M-P’s test scores continue to lag, even trailing nearby schools with similar poverty rates. More than half of the district’s freshmen fail one or more class, a high predictor of dropout rates. Something had to be done.
We applaud this new direction. The more teachers, parents and students work together, the more they can influence its success and overcome inevitable glitches. The rewards to students promise to be worth the effort.
To learn more about the district’s plans, visit www.msvl.k12.wa.us/.
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