myHighSchool REIMAGINED: Practical Solutions. Personalized Learning. Innovation Sustainability.

By Joseph Richard Poletti

The skills gap in many high school graduates contributes to the talent pipeline deficit in post-secondary destinations. Traditional public high schools can solve the challenge by emphasizing a variety of pathways to success. All students deserve intentional, acute and unique preparation and plans for post-secondary enrollment, enlistme

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Richard Poletti
• Release date: Mar 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987969014

Joseph Richard Poletti

For 37 years Joseph Richard Poletti's jobs as an educational professional have included classroom teacher, instructional technology facilitator, state department consultant, university program administrator, athletic director, central services director, and school administrator. He holds four college degrees. His professional affiliations and community service networks run deep. He has received local and state-wide recognitions.

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CHAPTER ONE

Collisions Create Energy

COMPETITION AND RELEVANCE

WHO AM I to write these words and this book? I am a 37-year veteran of public schools. My titles have included teacher, student support, central services director and school administrator. I have worked in inner-city and rural contexts. For thirty years, I have served in a variety of capacities in a coastal county in North Carolina. I have been called a futurist and a fixer. I see myself as a deep thinker with a bias towards action. For better or worse, I have often found myself six blocks ahead of the parade.

Although my career has been in public education, I am an avowed school choice proponent. Our daughters attended Catholic school, public school, the North Carolina School of Science and Math, and public and Catholic universities. I attended Catholic school, public school, and public and Catholic universities. I taught in an inner-city academic magnet school for seven years. I was an interim principal of an alternative school. In my extensive leadership work with the North Carolina High School Athletic Association, I was recognized by membership as a voice in support of the inclusion of charter and private schools. I am the principal of an early college.

Early colleges began popping up in NC during the early 2000’s and have become crown jewels in most Local Education Agencies (LEAs). Five years ago, our school system ventured into an early college model. The Marine Science and Technologies Early College High School (MaST) opened rather abruptly in our county and has been maligned in a political maelstrom ever since. Regardless of the multi-directional finger-wagging, MaST will close in June 2023. We can only consider what qualities of MaST are worth building upon in subsequent educational innovation.

I was the principal of a large traditional high school when MaST came into being. As such, I had to compete with MaST for students while cooperating with MaST as a sister school. In the spirit of co-opetition, I led our school to develop programs that would directly compete with MaST. Why? We didn’t want to lose students to perceived advantages that we already provided and could continue to provide. In turn, MaST would have to sharpen its saw. Thus, the potential and/or realization of improved programming for all was forged by the spirit of competition. Students and parents would then have to make choices in what was to become a buyer’s market.

Author’s Note: Choice rules a buyer’s market by driving competition. Competition makes everyone stronger. Creating choice that drives competition involves transformation and renewal. Transformation and renewal are growth opportunities.

QWest was the first fruit of a program-within-a-school learning community we started to compete with MaST. It has a graduation support focus. Scholastic Leader Academy (SLA) was the second fruit of a sustainable learning community in response to MaST. SLA pulls from the highest achieving eighth graders in the feeder middle schools. Growing success by design, SLA caters to 18% of the class, which is a jumpstart for the major portion of the statistical 26% that will transition on time through a four-year college program. SLA and QWest, which I reference in greater detail in Chapter Three, are freshmen academies that continue at West Carteret High School.

On the forefront of realizing the personalized learning benefits of specialized programming, why stop with SLA and QWest? Our next educational innovation turned to career academies for local in-demand employment pathways. In response to our aging population and our tourism economy, Health Science and Culinary jumped to the top of the list. The jobs are there! With support and partnership from central services Career and Technical Education leadership, we began a three-year trial-and-error journey to launch these projects. However, for a variety of reasons they could never get off the ground much less approach sustainability. No doubt the models exist in the offing. We just have yet to realize them.

Much of the stall for career academies had to do with the Covid pandemic. Never before has education encountered such disruption. As we were forced to respond to this unpredictable pandemic and its ripple effects, we developed a litany of innovation. First, we had to evolve universal Learning Management Systems (LMS) since face-to-face school as we knew it ceased to exist. Suddenly, Canvas and Google Classroom were battling not only for our attention but also for market share.

Upon our limited return to face-to-face, we were confronted with distancing and other safety guidelines from the Center for Disease Control.⁴ To make this work at a large high school, we evolved a daily schedule called PowerFlex. PowerFlex was earmarked by four consecutive one-hour classes, followed by an intervention and enrichment period. The major coup of PowerFlex was that all teachers agreed to teach four periods a day—rather than three—thus significantly reducing class sizes while increasing scheduling opportunities for students. While others were resigned to endure the Cohort Model, we had found a way to keep all of our students in school everyday during the Covid comeback.

In the initial phase of the pandemic, all students became virtual students if they so desired. Their other option was to take current grades as of mid-March 2020 and call it quits for the year. Too many did. For those that did not take the exception, school became virtual. virtualWEST was an outgrowth of that. In SY 20-21, 306 students started the year in