Struggling Students Sent Back To the Fold

Night High School To Be Disbanded

With 2,100 students, Montgomery County's Evening High School program was bigger than all but six of the county's traditional high schools. But it was hardly flourishing.

By 2005, when school officials reevaluated the decades-old program, it had become a dumping ground for struggling students who had failed courses in their neighborhood schools. Four-fifths of the teenage students were black or Hispanic, and the failure rate was much higher than in traditional schools.

"It was perpetuating failure," Steve Bedford, chief school performance officer for the school system, said in a recent interview.

This fall, the school system will begin to phase out evening study to make way for a new program, High School Plus.

With the new program comes a change in thinking about how to deliver instruction to students who fail classes. In the past, school officials urged students to make up lost credits in summer or evening school. In effect, neighborhood schools ceased to be accountable for those students, making them someone else's problem, Bedford said.

Frieda Lacey, deputy superintendent, told school board members in May that students in evening school reported being told they had no choice but to leave their neighborhood schools. "The doors were shut in their face," she said.

With High School Plus, responsibility for struggling students shifts back to the neighborhood schools. In the fall, each of the county's 25 traditional high schools will offer new courses after regular school hours to ninth- and 10th-grade students seeking to make up credits. Each school will also offer new classes during the regular instructional day geared specifically to "repeater" students.

Younger students, in particular, have had trouble getting to the three regional evening school locations because many of them cannot drive. In past years, the vast majority of evening students have been 11th- and 12th-graders, many of them repeating courses they failed in the ninth or 10th grade.

"And therefore they kind of delayed getting back on track until their 11th- and 12th-grade year, which meant they kept falling farther and farther behind," Kevin Lowndes, principal of Wheaton High School, said to school board members at the May meeting. "And this allows us to target them sooner and get them back on track quicker, and hopefully by staying on track, they'll have the motivation to stay on and finish with their graduating class."

Wheaton High piloted the High School Plus model last school year along with Einstein, Kennedy and Rockville high schools. Lowndes said Wheaton was "able to get quite a few students" caught up with their classmates, both with after-school study and with creative scheduling for students repeating courses. For example, the school began offering a first-semester algebra course in the second semester for students who had failed it in the fall.

Students in the pilot programs did better overall than students in the evening program: 81 percent passed their classes in the pilot, compared with 73 percent in evening program. Participation at the four pilot schools grew from 230 students in the fall semester to 501 in spring.

Evening High School will remain open in the fall for students in grades 11 and 12. By 2010, evening school will be no more.

School officials acknowledge that some students prefer evening courses, which have been offered in 90-minute blocks between 4:30 and 8:30 p.m. The later hours suit students who have child-care responsibilities or jobs.

During the May discussion, school board member Christopher S. Barclay (Silver Spring) expressed concern "that there's a population that may not be able to be served" when evening school is eliminated. Bedford and other staff members replied that those students will have more opportunities than before to make up credits during the regular school day. Saturday study is being considered, and Barclay urged school leaders not to rule it out.

Concerns about the growing isolation of black and Hispanic students in evening study prompted a review of the program in 2005. A work group identified a host of problems: students in the A (fall semester) and B (spring semester) sections of year-long courses were mixed together; teachers were neglecting to give final exams; curriculum guides were lacking; and staff were ill-trained, as in the case of a teacher's aide who was leading an 11th-grade English class.

A substantial benefit to the new "plus" model, administrators say, is that teachers will find the hours far more appealing than evening school. Course work in the new program will be more rigorous, they say.

A goal in the longer term, Bedford said, is to investigate new dimensions to add to the High School Plus program, such as "original credit" courses (for first-time students) after school, and offerings for students who need to make up small portions of courses -- say, half a semester, as opposed to an entire year.

"We're still kind of working through how do we go about doing that?" Bedford said.