The history of the New Bedford Leadership Academy is one of teacher-led initiatives intent on creating an autonomous small learning community within New Bedford High School. Instead of creating a plan within a binder, the design team has worked thousands of hours voluntarily over a year and a half to create a demonstration model of effective teaching, learning, support, and more. This model will serve as a transparent incubator of ideas and practices within the long term restructuring process of the high school. It is within the Restructuring Committee that the foundation of the Leadership Academy was built.
Restructuring Committee (September 2008 – December 2009): The Restructuring Committee was formed in the fall of 2008 by teachers, parents, students, community members and administration. We were charged with assessing needs and creating restructuring recommendations for the incoming Superintendent in July of 2009. Both of these tasks were accomplished by the end of the school year in June 2009. We facilitated a survey of 2000 + students and almost 200 faculty in issues from classroom instructional practices, school culture, technology, family involvement, student development, leadership and professional development and post-secondary and extra-curricular activities. Our recommendations to the Superintendent included research and suggestions on smaller learning communities, scheduling implications, instruction and assessment, professional development, business and community engagement, contract issues and funding needs. When we returned in the fall of 2009, we began working on a scheduling plan for an incremental move from block scheduling to larger issues implied in overall restructuring.
Restructuring Committee (December 2009 – June 2009): In December 2009, the Superintendent recommended a more comprehensive approach to our work, from addressing the schedule change to a exploring a complete restructuring of our high school. We began simultaneously 1) exploring research on different large urban high school transformation efforts around the country, 2) conducting site-visits to the local models such as the Boston Pilot Schools and Lawrence High School (built on thematic academies), 3) examining the data from our surveys (described above) done in March 2008, 4) creating a vision statement for our long term objectives and 5) beginning the work necessary to draft a strategic plan before the end of this current school year, so we can begin the design phase of our efforts in 2009-2010.
Designing New Academies (Summer 2009): Towards the end of June 2009, members of the Restructuring Committee decided that the most effective way to push forward the institutional and attitudinal change (necessary for our school to build capacity for change in September 2009) was to demonstrate various models of autonomous academies. Two groups emerged and took initiative. The focus of the first group was to design and implement an autonomous Alternative Academy for our most severe at-risk students while the second group created a Technology Academy within the school’s existing facility and schedule. Because of budget challenges, the district was not able to directly support either of these efforts for the summer of 2009. At this time, the Massachusetts Governor’s Executive Office on Education made available a series of planning grants throughout the state for districts that built autonomous small learning communities. They were called Readiness Schools. The Readiness Schools planning grant awarded funds during the summer of 2009 to design small learning communities that met the state’s performance contract while using new autonomies over schedule, curriculum, budget, staffing and other district policies (see Appendix 1). We applied for the Advantage School option within the grant guidelines in the end of June and were among 16 districts in the state who were awarded $10K to plan these academies.
The Readiness School Proposal: While our initial focus was to create an Alternative Academy for students who had the greatest needs, we quickly began to see that our team’s vision was not simply to address the needs of one sub-group, but to demonstrate advanced teaching in an engaged community for all students. In essence, we sought to create an institute for advanced study for all students (especially those ‘at-risk’), accelerating their learning and providing a model of innovative teaching strategies. Our discussions developed naturally around the theme of leadership. We decided to develop the curriculum, scheduling, staffing, budget, governance, partnerships, and more around this theme. Leadership would not be simply a label. It would become pervasive in all relationships, all decisions and all learning. We would then broaden our population to the rest of the school in the following years, so that we could be a model for autonomous small learning communities in the school’s broader transformation process.
