Education Week - September 7, 2022 - 17

Mentor Caitlyn Crews
works with students during
an after-school program
at Mountain Education
Charter High. The school
connects struggling
students with adults who
have faced similar
challenges.
What happened during remote learning, Mills said, was that " if
students were determined to access the resources they needed
to get good grades in the classes, they could do that, but students
still ended up doing it with a lot of unexcused absences. "
But " many other students just kind of fell off, not attending
and not doing the work, so we have to track them down, " she
added.
For example, Aubrianna Morris said she was on track to graduate
in 2021 from her North Charleston, S.C., high school before the
pandemic. After more than a year of remote instruction, however,
Morris left her school when she found she would have to retake
a full semester of courses she already had taken online because
she had not completed them during remote learning. Morris had
already started working, and her mother persuaded her to attend
the recovery program Lowcountry Acceleration Academy instead.
While Acceleration still uses an online platform for courses,
teachers assess each student now on their academic needs as
well as nonacademic barriers to graduating, such as family and
work responsibilities, mental and physical health issues, and
transportation or technology needs. Morris, for example, said
she took one class at a time from 10 a.m. to noon before working
weekday afternoons. Morris graduated from Lowcountry this
February and has joined the U.S. Army.
Mentoring provides
key support
Many programs have also upped their game by investing more
heavily in individual mentoring and social-emotional supports
for students, both through staff and community groups.
" Our kids typically do come to us having experienced some
sort of trauma, but we are seeing more and more kids coming
to us with trauma and mental health issues. It's not unusual for
us to see kids suffering with suicidal ideation, " said Sharp of Acceleration
Academies. Acceleration now assigns each student a
" life coach " -a licensed therapist or social worker-as well as a
career coach for postsecondary guidance.
Mountain Education schools in Georgia used a different strategy,
asking more than 1,000 teachers and staff members to write
about their life experiences and the social-emotional lessons
they had learned. Dubbed " Ridgerider Tales, " these essays became
the backbone of a new social-emotional curriculum to
teach students how to cope with anxiety, depression, problem
solving, and other issues students reported as their biggest challenges
during the pandemic.
" We recognized that it was going to be imperative to get the
students back to a place where they felt safe and secure and felt
supported at school, " Lovell said.
Teams of English teachers and counselors developed activities
and lessons for each essay aligned to five social-emotional competencies:
self-awareness, self-management, social awareness,
relationship skills, and responsible decisionmaking.
" So now, when a student enrolls, we do an initial assessment
with regard to their [social-emotional] competencies, and then
the student and mentor sit down with some of these tales to
process, " said Martha Kent, the director of student and staff
wellness at Mountain Education. " When students are learning
through the narrative in elementary school, they're identifying
with the characters in a story. Well, these stories are not fictional;
these, our kids know, came from our staff. So it makes it easier
for kids to identify with them. " Students who are struggling with
specific problems, such as caring for a sick family member, also
get connected with staff members who had faced similar problems
in the past.
The schools provide free mental health services, and each
student creates a self-care plan in addition to their academicrecovery
plan. Mountain Education created its own wellness app
to help students access resources and track their goals.
Spectrum, meanwhile, now trains all staff to be certified in
trauma-informed instruction, and everyone from teachers to
school secretaries to Mills herself has been enlisted to conduct
home visits after district social workers became overwhelmed.
" There are so many students needing to be addressed throughout
the county, we had to start to think outside the box, " Mills said.
" It's much more important that someone from our school team
shows up at the house to say, 'Where's Johnny? Why hasn't he
been here?' and get down to the root cause of what's happening. "
Each student has weekly in-person meetings with their school
mentors, as well as phone or email check-ins throughout the
week. Students also attend weekly " lunch and learn " sessions
with outside community groups and employers to answer questions
about local careers and trades, ending with a session on
applying for jobs and " interview speed dating " with local companies.
So far, Mills said, all the students who have participated
in the program have been offered at least one job after graduation.
" I
think in the long run, we don't just want kids that are academic
graduates. We want our graduates to be thoughtful and
caring. We want them to be balanced. We want them to have a
strong sense of how to plan and manage their time, " McNulty
said. " Because I think the essence of education is not to be successful
in school but to be successful when you leave school. "
" I think we're seeing
a lot of growth in
schools recognizing
the needs of our kids
were greater than the
academics and
[recognizing] a lot of
the issues around kids
managing their own
behaviors and the
stresses and trauma
of growing up in the
world today. "
RAYMOND MCNULTY
President of the National Dropout
Prevention Center
Dustin Chambers for Education Week
Education Week - September 7, 2022

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