Geoff Penrose: Offering alternatives in education

SANDPOINT — Geoff Penrose points right to his staff when asked why Lake Pend Oreille Alternative High School has been able to improve its metrics since he first arrived on the scene a little more than two years ago.

As principal, he leads a team that is uniquely qualified to work with this student population. More to the point, they enjoy the challenges involved in moving these kids toward high school graduation — an accomplishment that often sets that student apart as the first person in his or her family to reach the goal.

Take into account that a large percentage of these students come from high poverty households, with many having dropped out of traditional high school for reasons ranging from failed classes to teenage parenthood, and the achievement is all the more impressive.

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Historically, this school has been known as Lake Pend Oreille Alternative High School. Do you still use the word “alternative,” or is that seen in a negative light?

We are, by definition, still an alternative high school and the state has a very strict definition of what that constitutes. There’s a checklist that every student must qualify on and they have to have three checks on the top of the list or one check on the bottom.

The top ones are like, two or more semester credits behind, has failed one or more core subjects, has greater than 10 percent absence — strictly academic-type things. On the bottom are some of the bigger things, like currently on probation, is currently a parent. Most of our students who have one or more on the bottom also have a lot on the top.

Are these the same checklist items that create the designation of an “at-risk” student?

The state is very clear about what constitutes an at-risk student here. And at-risk is shorthand for at-risk to not graduate. So, there are a lot of reasons. There are a hundred kids who are here and a hundred different reasons.

By definition, we’re alternative, but we felt, moving forward, that we’re just a high school — a fully accredited, standalone high school just like any other in the state. We do offer an alternative to students; we do take alternative approaches to things, but in our heart, we’re a high school. So we dropped the word ‘alternative’ from our name. Also, it was kind of a mouthful. (laughs)

You mentioned a number of 100 students — is that current enrollment?

Right at this moment, we have 97. We go up and down, because our students have a little higher mobility than most students. In the last two-and-a-half years, we have really narrowed our windows for when we accept students. It used to be kind of just rolling. Now we do it for a two-week period leading up to the first day of the quarter.

We’ve been staying pretty steady at between 97-103 students throughout the year.

Is the graduation rate one of the primary benchmarks for your success?

It is. That’s really one of the things people misunderstand about alternative schools in this state. We’re given a difficult task, in that we are rated by the exact same system as any other high school in the state, which is not unreasonable — we’re a high school.

So when the star ratings came out, the last time this school was rated we were two stars out of five. One of the big reasons was about a 40 percent graduation rate. But what that means is that, for the students who are here, 40 percent of them graduate within four years after they started ninth grade — wherever they started it.

If a student starts ninth grade in Timbuktu, drops out for two years, comes to us two years behind and we don’t graduate them in a year, that counts against our graduation rate. The strict adherence to the four-year cohort in this state really is stacked against alternative schools. The task in front of us is to take students who have to be behind to be in this school and somehow accelerate their learning to an incredible rate heretofore unknown to man.

I would imagine that seems like an impossible task in some cases.

We have students coming in at, say, 20 years old with 10 credits. We don’t turn them away, even though we know they’ll likely ding our graduation rate, because we’re committed to our role in the community, which is to help kids who have stumbled somewhere along the way get a high school diploma.

Without that diploma, they’re hamstrung. It opens up employment opportunities and, perhaps for some, it leads to higher education or technical training.

Those state expectations not withstanding, how are the graduation rates at LPOHS?

We’ve increased for the last two years. We were at about 55 percent the year before last and last year, we came just short of 70 percent. Our goal this year is 80 percent.

Three of the students who counted as dropouts last year have already graduated this year — but they won’t count as graduates for us. We would like to see it on a five-, six- or even seven-year cohort model, because that’s what we do here – we take kids who are behind and we want to get them to graduation at some point.

I understand that it comes from federal guidance, but it seems pretty arbitrary to say, ‘We’re going to take all of the students who are most behind, put them in one school and expect them to graduate on time with their ninth-grade cohort.’

How do those statistics look when stacked up against a ‘traditional’ high school?

We’re actually not that far behind the state average. In this district, which is an extremely high-performing, excellent school district, it looks a little tough. I think Sandpoint High and Clark Fork High are in the nineties — they’re up there.

But, at the same time, most of our students came from Sandpoint High. So part of the reason schools have those high graduation rates is because of alternative schools taking those kids who are behind.

Do alternative high schools have any advantages to help offset these challenges?

The only advantage that the state offers is a much more favorable funding formula. Our divisor is 15-to-1, whereas, at a comprehensive high school, I believe it’s closer to 26- or 27-to-1.

The main advantage we have is small class sizes and a dedicated staff that enjoys working with this population and has a box of tools that we employ quite well to reach these types of kids and move them ahead to engage them in school.

Would LPOHS be kind of the Last Chance Texaco for a lot of these students in terms of having a shot at a high school diploma?

It sometimes seems that way, but we discourage kids from thinking of it as their last chance. We don’t ever want them to think they were ‘put here’ or that this is where they ‘ended up.’ We strongly encourage both the students and the community to see us as a choice.

When you choose to come here, it means you’re choosing something different in your life. It’s a really important moment for students. For many of them, it’s the first time they’ve been asked, ‘What do you want to do with your education?’ We don’t see ourselves as a last chance by any means. We see ourselves as one in an array of alternatives.

How would you describe the learning environment here?

It’s very one-on-one, very hands-on and highly supportive. One of the misconceptions about this school is that we are somehow looser. You can talk to any of these kids and they’ll tell you we’re actually a lot stricter in many ways — attendance, truancy, behavioral expectations.

It’s not because we don’t trust the kids or we have tougher kids. It’s because of that great advantage we have from the state. When you have eight or nine kids in a class, you can have that high level of supervision and expectation.

Do the smaller size and the shared experience create a tighter school community among students?

Very much so. One word you’ll hear a lot here from both students and staff is actually ‘family’ — something beyond community. I taught at an alternative high school in Alaska and we shied away from the word, family, because we thought, ‘Well, you have a family.’

Here, that felt like a little bit of boundary crossing to me. But this really, truly is a family — in all the good and bad of families, right? (laughs) We share each other’s joys and passions in a way that just doesn’t happen at most schools. On every poster in every room it says: ‘Be kind, for everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.’

What’s the social structure like at the school?

We all go by first names here. I’m Geoff to my students, which was interesting to me at first. In Alaska, I went through seven years as a regular school administrator, so I got used to being Mr. Penrose.

I’m not your peer, but I am someone who’s here to care about you as a human. When you’re having a bad day, or when you’re having a good day, I’m going to notice and I’m going to say something. If a student walks in here and they’re down, they’re going to have three or four adults talking to them before they ever even get to class, asking them, ‘What can I do to help you get ready to learn today?’

Can you envision a time when this school wouldn’t be necessary?

People always think it’s odd when I say this, but when I look at my own vision of what I’d like to see in education, a great indication of success would be no need for this school. I don’t want to work myself out of a job, but it would be great if every school was able to serve the needs of all the students. Education in America just isn’t quite set up to do that, hence the need for this type of school.

A high school diploma is a milestone in the education continuum. Is it something more than that when a student graduates from LPOHS?

Definitely. It’s quite a celebration. You’d be surprised, in this day and age, how many of our students are the first in their family to graduate from high school. It’s a momentous thing.

But it’s also personal and heartfelt because of the relationships we have with students. For instance, every graduating student is introduced in a fairly lengthy manner by a staff member. Sometimes it borders on a roast (laughs), but it tells of the pride we have in our students. Standing on that stage and accepting that diploma is a huge moment for these kids.

What kind of funding has fueled these success stories?

Two-and-a-half years ago, we were the recipient of a School Improvement Grant, which is under the general Title I funds, for the purpose of improving some of these numbers – graduation rate, achievement scores.

As a school, we were put into priority status, which means we were in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state. Alternative schools, not surprisingly, were grossly over-represented in that bottom 5 percent. When you take to most-struggling students in a district and put them all in one building, of course, that’s going to be a struggling school.

We’ve done some cool stuff with that grant money. We bought iPads – we have enough of them that every student can use one at any given time. We’ve put a ton of training behind the idea — which is my personal belief — that the only thing that can really make a lasting difference in education is the teacher. We also started a school-wide writing assessment my first year here and we purchased what is now the district wide standardized test that gives us far more nuanced data, so we can really track our students’ progress.

And we hired a graduation coach, whose main job is to think about, ‘How do we get these kids graduated?’

How much do socio-economics affect this student population?

We are a high poverty school. We’ve been as high as 95 percent and right now we’re at about 80 percent free-and-reduced lunch – it’s one of the realities of this school. One of the things we’ve been able to do to celebrate our students and encourage them to take healthy risks is get them up skiing at Schweitzer.

When I first got here, it shocked me how many of these kids had never been to Schweitzer and it’s just right there. Here are kids who were born and raised here and never set foot on the mountain. We see that as an important outreach. I just have to say that when we got back from Schweitzer, we had several comments like, ‘Man, that was the best-behaved school we’ve ever had up here.’ The students so respect that opportunity.

What are your broad-brush plans for LPOHS?

We have a long-term vision for this school where we are recognized as an education leader in this state. We want people to see us as a shining example of what education can be. We start every staff meeting with a reiteration of that goal and everything we do is directed toward the idea that these kids deserve the best.

One of my guiding principles is that the most needy students should get the most.