Teacher Instills Power To Learn Program Gives Faltering Students Tools To Succeed

Don’t be surprised to see some guy bounding around North Pines Junior High in a Power Ranger suit.

It’ll be John Griffiths, doing his thing.

Griffiths, 27, is assigned to the Power Room, a new program to help struggling students at the junior high level.

“I’ll be honest. I’m not the super teacher, who knows everything,” Griffiths said. Geometry, for instance, wasn’t his strongest subject. But after years of coaching and mentoring junior high kids, he knows how to motivate them.

The idea of the Power Room is simple. It’s a place for kids to recharge their batteries and get a taste of academic success. If educators wait until high school, too many of these students will fail, officials said. Other schools are trying to reach kids at this age, too. West Valley has a similar program; East Valley is considering how to fashion one. It’s too soon to know how big a difference the programs will make.

Griffiths takes kids whose teachers recommend them or who made an F last quarter - or kids who seek him out. He’s not hard to spot. He’s the young fellow whose energy and enthusiasm stand out like some sort of weird force field surrounding him.

The Power Room has seven desks. Kids spend a period or two there each week.

A lot of Griffiths’ attention goes to study skills. Each student gets a schedule to fill out showing how they spend their time, from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m.

“When a student says, ‘I talk on the phone from 5 p.m. until 9 at night,’ then they have to realize, ‘Hey, there’s four hours where I really didn’t do anything,”’ Griffiths said.

The young teacher also works on any subject the students need help with.

“There’s one kid who’s got a month’s worth of science assignments he hasn’t done,” Griffiths said. He does a lot of English and math, too.

The kids he works with have the tools in their heads, he said, even if they don’t realize it. He just helps kids pull them out and use them.

Principal Dave Bouge knows Griffiths’ charisma is essential to the program. And he knows the program is essential to kids who may otherwise drain into our court system or onto welfare.

“This age is where a lot of life decisions are made and they don’t even know it,” Bouge said.

Griffiths is a natural for the job. He grew up in the Valley, got his teaching credential at Eastern Washington University. While there, he put in two years of volunteering at North Pines in the former School Within a School program.

The Power Room is barely a month old. Teachers say they already see a change in study habits among certain kids who have spent time in the Power Room.

Larger questions are unanswered.

Can one teacher handle the number of kids who could use extra help? “Of all the folks I interviewed, John comes closest to being the one who can,” Bouge said.

How much help will the Power Room kids need to make a permanent change in their schooling?

What about money for next year? Federal money is paying for this year’s Power Room. Given the federal budget battle, next year’s funding is anything but clear.

West Valley’s Centennial Middle School has a similar program called SWAT, for Schoolwide Academic Tutoring. Now in its second year, officials are tracking the program’s results. In the first quarter, 76 percent of the kids who spent three or more periods a week passed the subject they were having trouble with, making at least a C grade.

At East Valley School District, a committee is starting to plan an alternative program for middle school students.

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