Spokane7
50°
November 21, 2010 in City
At 82 students, school district credits size for academic success
Bickleton School District also credits a new industry for financial stability
On the outskirts of Bickleton, Wash., windmills have been sprouting up on farms. The green energy source has been a boon to the small town, which is using some of the increased property tax revenue to fund a new $10.4 million K-12 school.
(Full-size photo)(All photos)
BICKLETON, Wash. – A recent report calls rural education “what works in Washington.”
That’s certainly true in south-central Washington’s Bickleton School District, which has academic and financial strengths that could make it the envy of any district in the state.
The 82-student Bickleton district boasts a 100 percent graduation rate; 78 percent of the students in seventh through 12th grades achieve a 3.0 grade-point average or better; and 90 percent of the students move on to higher education.
Now, a new revenue stream – windmills – is helping the remote district fund construction of a state-of-the-art K-12 school.
“In Bickleton, you have to want to fail. Their teachers get on them, their coaches. We pull them aside, talk to the parents,” said Superintendent Ric Palmer. “We find solutions so they have a successful education experience.”
Close-knit, ‘all basically related’
The lockers at Bickleton High School stand open; no one worries about theft. Every face in the K-12 school is familiar, there are no cliques – and no cell phone service.
Katelynn Clinton, 18, does have one complaint. The boyfriend potential at Bickleton High School is limited, with just 11 boys in grades nine through 12.
“We are all pretty close, and we are all basically related,” she said, noting that her brother and a couple cousins are among her male classmates.
Three of her classes – drama, cooking and math – are taught by her mother, Kim Clinton.
“Oh. And have you met the business manager? That’s my grandma,” Katelynn said.
But the young woman doesn’t begrudge her experience in the rural district. She’s academically confident – a 3.95 GPA – and was just accepted to Washington State University.
Bickleton requires students to complete 26 credits, which exceeds the requirements of both the state and Spokane Public Schools.
High school requirements in Spokane’s largest district, in fact, “are less than what’s needed to get into college,” said Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Nancy Stowell, something the district tells incoming freshmen.
For Spokane to require 26 credits, the district would need an additional class period per day, Stowell said.
Bickleton’s extended day – 8 a.m. to 3:40 p.m. – accommodates the higher credit requirement and is possible because of the district’s four-day school week. The Monday-through-Thursday schedule was instituted last winter to reduce transportation costs in the 500-square-mile district.
Smaller class sizes also contribute to the students’ academic success. The average class size in so-called “rural remote” districts is five to 10 students, which can be an ideal teaching environment, many educators say. “It’s easier to tell if someone isn’t catching on,” said Bickleton elementary teacher Julie McBride, 46. With a computer for every two students, good kids and supportive families, “Bickleton is pretty ideal, really,” she said.
Jayce Alexander, 11, moved to the district a year ago. “Since it’s a smaller group, my teachers can help me. It’s really helped me with my reading and math,” the fifth-grader said.
Clinton’s high school physics class consists of five students. During a recent class, while the students worked on problems, there was an open discussion about how they found solutions. If there was still uncertainty, the teacher was there to guide them.
“Can we have an answer check, Mrs. (Barbara) Seymour?” one student asked. “What did you get?” the teacher replied. The student admitted she had two answers. When neither was correct, the four other students chimed in along with Seymour to lead her to the answer.
“This is a special school,” Seymour said.
Randy Dorn, Washington’s superintendent of public instruction, says he’s a small-schools advocate. “There’s less of a chance of a student falling through the cracks. There’s more of a chance for a student to develop a relationship, and we know that’s the No. 1 reason for a student staying in school.”
Urban schools have frequently tried to duplicate that small-school atmosphere. Spokane Public Schools, for example, has several programs that use a “schools-within-schools” model, including the On-Track Academy credit retrieval program for juniors and seniors, Havermale alternative high school, and LC Core at Lewis and Clark High School, which pairs struggling students with teachers.
“The teachers really get to know the parents and students. They build relationships with those parents,” Stowell said. But generally, “in big, comprehensive high schools like ours where teachers have 150 students every day, they have a harder time of doing that.”
In addition, some educators believe the schools-within-schools approach has a downside of further segregating struggling students from the mainstream.
Rural school districts in Washington have the highest average of on-time graduates, according to a recent study by the Rural Education Center at Washington State University. But Bickleton is still a standout among comparable districts.
The 77 Washington schools that fit into the “rural remote” category – 25 miles from an urbanized area – have an average graduation rate of 77.4 percent, the study states.
“If a student starts to slip in a subject, we pull them out and catch them up,” said Palmer, the Bickleton superintendent. “Even though we’re rural, we produce a good product. We don’t have all the bells and whistles. We are what we are.”
Windfall from windmills
Voters in the Bickleton School District approved a $10.4 million bond to build a new school last year; Palmer says the knowledge that wind turbines have increased property values, and likely will continue to do so, helped prompt those “yes” votes.
“The windmills – they are huge for us in this unstable economy,” he said.
Oregon, Washington and California have all agreed to use a higher amount of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and geothermal, said Michael Milstein, a spokesman for the Bonneville Power Administration. Consequently, windmills dot the hillsides along the Columbia River Gorge and in other high-wind areas of the state.
So far, about 800 turbines have gone up on wheat farms in Klickitat County where Bickleton is located, which has increased property values there by about $600 million in four years.
“The project they’ve done has paid for what we need,” Palmer said. “The rest is gravy.”
The forecast is for as many as 3,000 to 5,000 wind turbines for the area.
“If all the towers go up that they are talking about, that will increase the tax base to about $1.2 billion,” Palmer said.
The Oakesdale School District, a wheat farming community about 30 miles southwest of Spokane in Whitman County, and the Pomeroy School District in Columbia County, about 100 miles farther south, could soon benefit from the same financial windfall. Wind turbine projects in both of those regions are in the planning stages.
In the Oakesdale area, First Energy LLC is asking for permits to put up 50 windmills on 5,000 acres of farmland, according to previous news reports.
The superintendent of the 120-student district says the project is so new he hasn’t determined what it will mean for schools financially. Nor have district officials in Pomeroy – with about 300 students – who expect about 440 of the turbines to be online in 2013.
But education officials in both districts realize it will be easier to go to voters for money.
“We would continue to ask for what’s needed, but nothing more,” said Pomeroy Superintendent Kim Spacek.
“Whenever your tax base can increase, that’s a good thing,” Oakesdale Superintendent Jake Dingman said of the windmills. “If the tax base increases, it (what people pay for school bonds and levies) goes down.”
The last time the Bickleton School District asked for a bond or a levy was in 1960, the business manager there said.
Last year, the schools’ heating and cooling systems began failing, and increased traffic made it dangerous for children to cross the street between the elementary and middle and high schools. Orange pylons mark the crosswalk frequently used by students going between the buildings; with the development of wind farms in Bickleton, the road that divides the shared schools has become busy with trucks, trailers and workers’ vehicles.
“It’s getting too dangerous for those kids crossing the road,” said Judy Naught, the district’s business manager.
“Getting them all under one roof was a major issue,” Palmer said.
The new K-12 school is expected to open in fall 2011.
Palmer was relieved to have a new tax base that helped make the bond issue palatable to voters.
“The last thing I wanted to do was bankrupt the district or the community,” he said. “I didn’t want to be known for that.”
Recent stories by Jody Lawrence-Turner
School districts emphasize science, trades May 26, 2012 4- Students to pay, work for prank May 24, 2012
- Sandpoint High students vandalize school in senior prank May 23, 2012 7
- Spokane schools officials’ pay frozen May 15, 2012 18
- Redinger brings fresh direction, expectations to District 81 May 13, 2012 7
eagleproducer on November 21 at 12:32 p.m.
Really? Smaller classes with more one on one attention actually improves student achievement? Didn’t Dazee say packing students in like sardines is perfectly fine because it is the teacher who establishes tempo?
Shylock13 on November 21 at 1:55 p.m.
My wife and I are both retired teachers, she in elementary school and I at the university level. For decades we have believed that the real key to student achievement is small class size coupled with a talented teacher. At the elementary level, a heterogeneous class of 30 or more students often sentences the bright to boredom and the less bright to frustration. But three classes of 10 each will allow teachers to work with EACH student individually. Would shifting to such a system cost money? Certainly, but it would end up being cost-effective because the graduation rate would soar as the drop-out rate significantly declined. And those who drop out of school quite often cost taxpayers a lot of money. At the university level, students in large lecture classes are only names on a list to the professors. In much smaller lecture/discussion and seminar classes, professors do get to know their students, and it is at that level that students can be “inspired” by faculty (and get well-thought out references from faculty who know them and their work quite well. Graduate level instruction usually involves only small classes and seminars. To change the undergraduate experience in large lecture classes, some faculty will periodically break the class into discussion groups or use other techniques to try to reach out to students. If the budget priorities were changed, the entire educational system from pre-school through graduate school could be immensely improved, and all of society would benefit!
oneanddone on November 21 at 3:58 p.m.
Wonder what university you worked at Teddy - Wheaties U? The Big10 school I went to had TA’s for large lecture classes. All the professor did was stand up in front of an auditorium and drone. I wasn’t a name, number, or even a sentient being to those schmucks. It was only in the TA section that I learned anything. All full blown professors want to do is research with grad students and maybe a class or two at the 400 level. Actually, it sounds like you never really even went to college there Teddy.
Spokane_Citizen on November 21 at 4:10 p.m.
Well…it’s quite apparent that a university education was quite wasted on oneanddone ….or perhaps he was just wasted…..
misjustice on November 21 at 4:45 p.m.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
How about that? Smaller classes AND windmills, together, in a story about success! Imagine that!
; )
ChefGus/ John Olsen on November 21 at 4:57 p.m.
In 1963 a class of 350 from Rogers sent 35 students off to college… we all pretty much traveled in tandem through our tortuous travail at high school.. we were all in the same classes together….all the time cept for the variety in choice of foreign language.. we all had:
8 credits of Math
8 credits of Science
8 credits of English
8 credits of History
8 credits of Foreign Language
4 Credits of Shop and P.E.
Most of us were national merit scholars and that year was the high point on average for college board scores ever……
So one might ask??? What changed?? There was no AP stuff , it is just what one did to get away from Spokane to a full life elsewhere. John
Bruce (aka thatoneguy) on November 21 at 6:52 p.m.
oneanddone didn’t do so well in reading comprehension…
austindepaolo on November 21 at 8:33 p.m.
It helps too that Bickleton has no families that qualify for free and reduced hot lunch and is pretty homogenous. See OSPI http://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/summary.aspx?groupLevel=District&schoolId=131&reportLevel=District&orgLinkId=131&yrs=&year=2009-10
Story seems a little oversymplified to me. What about the rural districts that don’t have the jobs and the tax base? And what about Levy Equalization which could get cut? I know the article was written early in the week but $1.2 billion in proposed state cuts were announced on Thursday.
mdriftmeyer on November 21 at 8:48 p.m.
“Wonder what university you worked at Teddy - Wheaties U? The Big10 school I went to had TA’s for large lecture classes. All the professor did was stand up in front of an auditorium and drone. I wasn’t a name, number, or even a sentient being to those schmucks. It was only in the TA section that I learned anything. All full blown professors want to do is research with grad students and maybe a class or two at the 400 level. Actually, it sounds like you never really even went to college there Teddy.”
WSU Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science with several minors to my belt.
The 100 and 200 level classes were all taught by Professors who had graduate students running the labs.
The 300 and 400 level classes were all taught by Professors in Engineering who had graduate students running the labs.
It doesn’t matter how many hours the Professor teaches while fulfilling his Research area, if the student doesn’t learn to reach out to the Professor and the TA during the Semester for trying to understand his Heat Transfer, ThermoSystems, Vector Analysis, etc., you are dead in the water, with a few exceptions.
The best Professors I knew all put their lectures, with all derivations and solutions for you to purchase—the top in the class all bought them.
The top Professors included multiple ways of how to solve each problem.
My top Professor, Ameer Hassan, whose been in the US since the early 1980s and was a multiple professor of the year recipient included 3 different ways to solve your Kinematics, Machine Design, etc., problems.
If you couldn’t figure on of those ways out you should have changed your degree.
If High Schools were more focused [they used to be] on introducing students to group projects, intensive learning from Grade school on, and with two branches [Trades and the Sciences] we’d see kids tuning in far more than tuning out.
Bring back the applied trades and applied sciences with intensive labs so kids know how to apply math, chemistry, physics, biology, crafts, fine arts, metallurgy, etc., and you’ll have far fewer kids tuning out.
Babysitting doesn’t work. Getting kids involved and showing them how stuff works gets them excited to learn.
zelda on November 21 at 9:17 p.m.
Maybe these students don’t spend their entire day at school texting each other. Just a guess…
austindepaolo on November 21 at 9:20 p.m.
mdriftmeyer, I’m with you on…”Getting kids involved and showing them how stuff works [which] gets them excited to learn.” Group projects or cooperative learning gets complicated much like the real world because some kid does more work than some of the others. How do you assess that? In our assesment happy culture.
Not sure about the rest of your rant.
jjarvis on November 22 at 2:17 p.m.
As someone who grew up in that school district/community yes it is a great evironment in terms of education; and in some ways educational environment, but beyond that you have a form of politics that is completely unfair to both students and their parents who have to take part. If you don’t grow up in that community, take part in the community activities, and conform to community beliefs you are considered an outsider which not only affects how you participate in school, but how you are treated as well. I was one of those students. You still have large school issues such as bullying, and in most cases its even worse considering you deal with it REGULARLY. The education is great and I will not dispute that, but you need to consider all aspects of life when saying that something is the way to go.