Lowell's Experience at the National Dropout Prevention Center Conference # 2
Here are a couple of extra tidbits: I found gas for $1.89 a gal. on the way up. Yippie! They are really big on feeding us sausage and homemade biscuits at this thing. I’m stuffed. This morning I met an old friend Judy Thomas. She was the Guidance Director at Mainland High back when I was doing mental health counseling for Halifax Medical Center. I had an office fulltime at Mainland and filled my day seeing distressed Mainland students. Judy was great and became a good friend. She moved away and ended up in the district office of Palm Beach County Schools. Patty, if you ever need a favor tell Judy we work together and she’ll help. It was great to see her again. She’s a Compliance Specialist working with ”graduation coaches”. My first session of the day was presented by Michael Matwick of Pinnacle Education Inc. from Tempe, Arizona. His school is remarkably similar to FLVS and has followed a similar path. They started as a small grant and have grown to about one sixth our size. They are state funded, use certified teachers in about the same proportions as we do, have students taking on-line courses from home, and some from school labs. They partner with districts in AZ. They sound like us. One big difference is that they started as a brick & mortar charter school and then branched out to delivery models and support like ours. In their charter school they had a physical location that students attended but used on-line curriculum, so in essence they started with a blended model. They still have that blended model as one of several delivery models. Michael’s presentation highlighted for me some of the successful elements of FLVS’ delivery of instruction that are clearly worth replicating. The relationship of the teacher to the student is at the top. Lot’s of talk about relationships here today. Relationships make kids successful in school. Dr. Christopher Throm runs a small alternative ed sight in San Antonio, TX. I attended his workshop because he was talking about preparing students for life after high school. They do a cool thing. The day the student arrives they take his picture in a cap & gown. That will be his graduation picture. Their philosophy is to start with the end in mind, so graduation is an assumed fact and career planning starts from day one. I talked with him about our career webinars and it became clear what a valuable resource we are creating. Career exploration makes high school course work ”real world” relevant. In fact I became inspired to start doing searches for other organizations around the country that are doing what we are doing, but couldn’t find any. We may really be on to something here. Our Keynote Speaker for lunch was an over the top guy, Dr. Adolph Brown III. He arrived disguised as a hip hop/ thug - hoodie, pants below the waist, ball cap sideways, ripped backpack. He definitely looked the part of a potential drop out. He tried to take a seat and a lady told him it was taken already. From the stage he called her out and told everyone that there was still nobody sitting in that seat. Wouldn’t have wanted to be her. He was definitely engaging and challenging. His theme amounted to caring about every student. He said that if we can’t bring ourselves to care about every student then we need to get new jobs. I agree.
