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Out-of-the-box education
Animas High School is on the way to achieving results to match San Diego model
Photo by KARLA SLUIS/Herald photo illustration
With challenging issues in public education at the forefront in Durango and nationally, what better time to be thinking about how every child, from any socioeconomic background here, can be assured of a great education.
Durango's new public charter school, Animas High School, is priming itself to collaborate with members of our community to make that vision a reality.
Animas High School itself was just a dream five years ago. A group of parents wanted choices available when their children became teenagers and reached high school. They envisioned a small school with an engaging curriculum, great teachers, high expectations and support for every learner. When they discovered a highly successful "village" of public charter schools in San Diego called High Tech High, they secured a charter from the state of Colorado to replicate the model. Animas High School opened this fall and the experiment is under way.
With only two months under its belt, AHS students and faculty are fully immersed in the project-based learning model that is an essential feature of the San Diego schools. The model has achieved remarkable results there, with every indication it is translating well to Durango. With 42 percent of the San Diego student body eligible for free and reduced lunches, and 53 percent who would be the first generation in their family to attend college, its college acceptance rate is a stunning 99 percent. High Tech High's project-based curriculum leaves no room for "teaching to the test," yet its scores on statewide tests are 15 percent higher than the rest of the district; its SAT scores an average of 139 points higher.
Obviously, something's going on in San Diego. High Tech High founder Larry Rosenstock said, "We're teaching students to behave like scientists, we're not preparing them to fill in bubbles on standardized tests." Recent reports by The National Research Council support Rosenstock's approach: Children should be doing science in the classroom like scientists, working in teams on complex problems, perfecting the arts of argumentation and discourse (Scientific American Mind, Sept-Oct 2009 issue.) Teachers at AHS work hard to prepare their students for this challenging model. They arrive early, well before the students. They lead projects that are rigorous, rich in content, designed to appeal to student interests, and relate to authentic problems that people care about in the adult world. That goes for all subjects: the arts, humanities, mathematics, science and the study of a foreign language.
As part of understanding what it means to be a historian, students are reading primary sources, including Thucydides on the history of the Peloponnesian War. The "tech" piece is embedded in the curriculum as tools for research, presentations and exhibitions, and science and math are on a par with the humanities. The model has been described as "a liberal arts education disguised by a technology mask." Students are learning Spanish in a rich cultural context, interviewing Spanish speaking immigrants and communicating with children in Tijuana whose families live and work at the dump and are the subject of their teacher's documentary film, "The Tijuana Project." Physics, long regarded as one of the most abstract and difficult subjects to learn, is taught with algebra in a project-based design. Animas students were becoming familiar with the equations behind Newton's laws of force and velocity as they relate to automobiles when a Public Service Announcement competition was announced by Four Corners Broadcasting. Called "Arrive Alive," the contest focused on "distracted driving," a timely topic for 14-year-old physics students approaching driving age.
Incorporating the contest as a culminating project of their studies of motion, the students used lab activities and driving simulations before preparing scripts for 30- and 60-second messages. They critiqued multiple drafts of one another's work, refined their messages and met a strict deadline. Animas High School took 1st, 2nd and 3rd places in this local competition, with five runners-up. Newton's laws and driving safety - an unforgettable combination.
I became involved with our local education scene when my children were students in the Durango school district. As my older son discovered interests that lay beyond the traditional classrooms of our only high school, he spent much of his time arranging interesting internships and hands-on independent studies. In his junior year, he left for a private boarding school that was a much better fit. If Animas High School had been around in the mid-1990s, I am fairly certain he would have chosen it and happily stayed in town a few extra years.
Kids and parents need options. Animas High School, as Durango's new public charter school, is providing an exciting one.
Bliss Bruen is an educational counselor and advocate for community conversations.
Her husband, Jim Judge, is on the board of Animas High School. The school can be reached at 247-2474.
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