The Right Direction> Piscataquis Community High School, Guilford, Part 1 of 3

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Editor’s Note: What makes a good high school? Because every community is different, there is probably not a single “best” model. In this three-part series Bangor Daily NEWS reporters Susan Young and Catherine Heins profile three high schools in eastern Maine and across the border in New Brunswick identified by the Governor’s Commission on Secondary Education as models of innovation.

Day 1 — Piscataquis Community High School in Guilford has increased test scores, boosted college attendance and reduced its dropout rate by raising academic standards for all students.

Day 2 — A self-paced curriculum aims to make students assume more responsibility for their educations at Southern Victoria High School in Perth-Andover, New Brunswick.

Day 3 — Mount Desert Island High School in Bar Harbor has developed a reputation for its progressive social conscience.

GUILFORD — Ryan Priest’s eyes light up as he talks about the college-level algebra class he’s taking at Piscataquis Community High School. He admits the work is hard, but he’s proud he was given the chance to take the advanced math course.

While there is nothing unusual about high school students taking algebra, it is unusual for a school to have all of its students — including those like Priest who are not at the top of the academic heap — take the course.

“They don’t favor [certain] kids anymore,” said Priest, a senior from Sangerville. “Everyone is equal.”

He admits he wouldn’t have taken more difficult courses such as algebra if he didn’t have to. But now he’s more confident about his academic skills and “definitely” wants to go to college, where he hopes to play basketball.

“I wish I were younger, because things [at PCHS] are headed in the right direction,” Priest said.

The academic path in Guilford, a town centered on a textile mill in southern Piscataquis County, where the unemployment rate hovered around 6 percent in August, wasn’t always headed in the “right” direction.

A decade ago, the school’s scores on the Maine Educational Assessment were among the worst in the state. Today, they are among the highest. Last year, the school’s juniors scored perfect 400s on three sections of the test. Schools that typically have scores this high include Falmouth and Cape Elizabeth, where the socioeconomic status is high, as well as private John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor.

At the same time, the number of students from PCHS who go on to college has increased substantially while the school’s dropout rate has declined.

PCHS has achieved this success in part, say officials, because it requires all students to take upper-level courses such as algebra and physics, classes often taken only by top-performing students who have long had their sights set on college.

Even though poverty is more widespread in Piscataquis County than in most parts of the state, it shouldn’t become an excuse for poor performance, say school officials.

“Learning has nothing to do with socioeconomic factors,” said PCHS Principal Bruce Lindberg. “If you expect less, you’ll get less. … It depends on what you expect of kids.”

High expectations

Compared to past practices, PCHS now expects a lot. To graduate, all students must take three years of math and science and two years of social studies besides the standard four years of English. All students must complete courses in physics and algebra. Starting this year, all students also are required to take at least one year of a foreign language to graduate.

It is only common sense that students wouldn’t do well on exams if they aren’t familiar with the material being tested, said Norman Higgins, who was principal of PCHS for 10 years before taking over the district’s superintendent job three years ago when the superintendent was named deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Education.

So, he said, the school aimed to have all students read Shakespeare, do algebra and physics problems, and write essays and poetry so that when they were tested on such material, whether by the Maine Educational Assessment or other tests, they had a chance at doing well.

For years, PCHS operated like other schools, with some students taking college prep classes such as advanced math and physics while others took business math and home economics. Although the school’s scores on the MEA were consistently low, there was no community outrage, Higgins said. He said the scores were assumed to be good enough for a school in a poor, rural part of the state.

When he became principal in 1985 after teaching government at the school for 16 years, Higgins, who grew up in a poor family in nearby Charleston, decided to challenge the conventional wisdom that “some will excel, but most won’t.”

While he and other school leaders said they believed all students could excel academically, the school was not set up that way. “What we professed in words is not what we practiced on a daily basis,” Higgins said.

“If we believed all kids can learn given the right circumstances, what do those circumstances look like?” he recalled thinking at the time.

So, with an $8,000 grant from the state Department of Education, the school set out in 1989 to find those circumstances by developing a common curriculum for freshman students.

Many skeptics thought this wouldn’t work or was a passing fad that would be forgotten in a few years. Instead, Higgins, who had never before applied for a grant, asked for more than $500,000 from RJR Nabisco to implement a common core curriculum and make other changes in the school. The high school was one of 15 chosen in 1991 for the prestigious national grants. It is the largest corporate gift ever given to a Maine school.

The money not only allowed the school to change its curriculum, buy a lot of technology and retrain its teachers, the funds gave the reform efforts legitimacy and recognition. Television crews and newspaper reporters, as well as educators from around the country, soon were trooping through the school in search of the secret to successful education reform.

Simple reforms

What they found was not revolutionary or really complicated. Many of the changes made at PCHS seem simple.

Traditional 45-minute periods were replaced with 80-minute blocks, for example. A new school calendar was established with a one-week break every seven weeks. The daily schedule has a common half-hour lunch period for all students and teachers.

Classroom furniture was rearranged. There are no rows of desks at PCHS. Instead, students cluster around tables that foster group discussion. Teachers typically move around the room from group to group rather than standing at the front and talking.

Teachers encourage students to seek out information on their own. In Jody Difrederico’s 11th-grade English class, for example, students presented reports on Norse mythology. Most used the Internet and one student admitted the assignment prompted him to go to his town’s library for the first time. He found a lot of useful information — some of it even in books, he said.

Difrederico asked the students if they thought they learned more by finding information on their own or from her “standing up here and feeding you information.” Students agreed they learned more and retained it longer if they had to do the research themselves and then share it with their peers.

Class presentations are common at PCHS. Students are often seen toting large hand-made books through the school’s halls. These books, made of paper bags, are a low-tech way for students to share what they have learned about a given topic, whether it be Norse gods or algebraic equations.

But the biggest change and the one that has education pundits throughout the state and country talking, has to do with tracking, the practice of predetermining whether students will take college or noncollege preparatory courses. Guilford has done away with it.

Although there is no tracking per se at PCHS, there are variations in what are called “curricular pathways.” For example, students can take an applied algebra course which uses a hands-on approach to teaching, as opposed to a theory-based course more akin to traditional math classes. The applied course, which follows the curriculum for the same class at Kennebec Valley Technical College, comes with the bonus of three college credits.

Students also may choose “survival” foreign language courses that cover basics such as reading road signs and menus and only touch upon Spanish or French culture as opposed to more intense speaking courses that usually require more than one year of study.

Those who complete the basic curriculum can go on to take advanced science and English courses in their senior year. At the request of a small group of seniors, a calculus course was being taught this fall to five students who had taken all of the math classes the school offered.

Superintendent Higgins said many parents who sent their children to private school now send them to PCHS. He said the school now attracts plenty of high-quality teachers, too.

“Here they push you to get a good education,” said Carolyn Leone, a senior from Harmony who chose to attend PCHS over the public high schools in Dover and Dexter.

Leone said she likes the school of 330 students because everyone is friendly and students don’t divide into cliques, a possible side effect of a more democratically based curriculum.

She is one of 10 girls this year in an advanced biology class, one of three advanced science courses the school offers. While few girls took upper-level math and science courses a decade ago, they now account for a large part of the enrollment in these classes.

Cassady Regan, a senior from Wellington, said she likes having students with different academic abilities taking classes together. She said bright students benefit from helping others to understand difficult material. She said she doesn’t believe the new groupings have slowed down the academic progress of the school’s smartest students.

Regan, who plays field hockey and basketball, runs track and is active in student government and the National Honor Society, said she thinks the block scheduling of classes has prepared her to learn in a college setting where most classes are more than 45 minutes long.

“We’re expected to do more critical thinking than busywork,” she said.

Technology difference

While low-tech paper bags are a fixture at PCHS, so are computers. Every classroom has at least one with Internet access and the computer labs are equipped with high-speed, up-to-date models.

Students are encouraged, from the time they are freshmen, to use the computers for much more than word processing. A computer class required of all freshmen covers the use of spreadsheets, e-mail, desktop publishing and data management programs, and the popular Power Point program that is used to create presentations. Some students create their own Web sites.

Computer teacher Bob Emrich said he sees his task as teaching students how to use computers to support their other classes. For example, every assignment they hand in after their freshman year must be done on a computer.

Students typically line up well before school opens to get into the computer lab, which is open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Some work on assignments, others check their e-mail.

All of this technology wouldn’t be available at a finacially strapped school like PCHS without outside money. A large portion of the RJR Nabisco grant was used to buy computers and other technological resources. PCHS is now the technological envy of Piscataquis County and much of the state.

Supportive staff

But, as students themselves say, these changes would not have succeeded without a staff that believed in them. It is no surprise that since the reforms began, there has been a lot of staff turnover in Guilford. No teachers were fired, but those who felt they no longer fit in with the school’s philosophy left, Higgins said.

Some who stayed have converted. “It’s more of a challenge to teach those groups, but I think it’s working,” veteran science teacher Bill Thompson said of the students who, in the past, were likely to get left behind.

“To me, public education is responsible for setting up an environment whereby all students have an equal opportunity to learn. We’re working hard to get closer to that,” said Thompson, who has taught in the district for 32 years.

He said the so-called marginal student may never work as an engineer at Maine Yankee nuclear power plant, but that student will have an understanding of physics.

“We’re seeing the masses get a good education,” he said.

Students also have high praise for principal Lindberg, who oversaw high schools in Ellsworth and Aspen, Colo., before coming to Guilford three years ago.

Lindberg strolls through the halls, chatting with students, not telling them what to do or where to go. Recently, he bought sweat shirts with “PCHS” emblazoned on the front and gave them to teachers to reward students they see doing good things such as helping peers with classwork or cleaning up after others.

“If you get in trouble, you feel bad because of what he thinks of you,” said senior Brock Starbird, a middle-of-the-road student from Sangerville.

He shakes his head with amazement when he talks about Lindberg sending Christmas cards — with handwritten, personalized messages — to every student in the school.

Because of this relationship and because teachers also go out of their way to help, Starbird said, students respect the school and its occupants. He said there are no graffiti, no food fights in the cafeteria and no smoking in the bathrooms because students would not put up with such behavior.

When the chaotic half-hour lunch period is over, students who must eat in the hallways and classrooms because the small cafeteria can’t hold them clean up after themselves.

“The upper classmen don’t put up with bad behavior. They tell people to straigten up,” Starbird said, adding that he hoped to be the school’s student of the month before he graduates. “The whole point of coming to school is to succeed.”