West Valley tweaks Gates grant

Five years ago, West Valley High School was selected as one of 16 “Washington Achievers” schools by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Achievers grant gave low-income students the opportunity to compete for $100 million in four-year full-ride scholarships for a 10-year period. So far, 238 West Valley students have received these scholarships.

As a condition of the grant, the foundation gave the district more than $400,000 to restructure the school of 800 students into smaller schools-within-a-school. The foundation’s goal was to improve American high schools by creating smaller, more personal learning environments.

But after five years the small school initiative is getting mixed reviews. The foundation is broadening its focus and putting its grant money into improving instruction, particularly in math and science.

“I think the foundation initially had the idea that if you just made schools smaller everything else would change and improve. They found out that while that had some benefits, if you didn’t work on teaching and learning specifically, it wasn’t going to magically make everything better,” said Gene Sementi, assistant superintendent at West Valley.

Last year, the American Institutes for Research and SRI International found that the Gates grantees have raised attendance, lowered dropout rates and significantly decreased behavior problems. But on a whole, the studies didn’t find dramatic gains in student achievement.

Before receiving the grant, West Valley already had a low dropout rate and no significant behavior problems, said Sementi. “Those were strengths of the school to begin with.”

When the Gates small-school initiative began, some of the schools across the state and the country looked like small magnet schools.

“If you had a 2,000-student high school you might have it divided into an art school and a science school and a project school, all with real different approaches,” Sementi said.

If one school decided it was going to be a college prep school and offered only math, science and Advanced Placement classes, and another school was going to be a general track school, the college prep school would attract all the high achieving kids. When this happened, you lost leadership and role models and a lot of other things in the other academies, Sementi said.

“The competition for students sometimes played out in a rather negative way. West Valley started down that road but they decided that (academies) didn’t have to be different,” said Sementi.

“The benefit of a small school is that students get to know their teachers better and they get to know the kids they’re in class with. We were able to achieve those things without having one academy be really different from another.”

Originally the school was divided into three academies, but staffing and scheduling became an issue.

Today students at West Valley march in the same band, play on the same team and park in the same parking lot, but half of them attend West Valley Academy and the other half attends Eagle Academy.

Brad Liberg, a vocational/technical teacher, is one of five teacher-leaders for West Valley Academy. Liberg said he doesn’t see a significant difference in the two academies’ identity, but that could change over time.

“All the core classes are represented with staff at each academy. As that student comes up through the academy, the English, science and math teachers have them repeatedly through the student’s career so that they have a better relationship with them. They connect better,” said Liberg.

Each student in both academies has a teacher mentor. They meet in groups of 15 to 20 students for 85 minutes 24 times a year. “Students that have more connections with more adults are more successful. They stay in school, get better grades and have fewer behavior problems,” said Gary Neal West Valley principal.

The Gates Foundation has been good for West Valley. In July, the district was one of two schools from the original 16 schools in Washington to receive an additional $511,000 expansion grant from the Washington State Achievers Scholarship Program.

“We feel like we’re doing a good job getting kids college-ready, and we want to keep that momentum up at West Valley High School and at our other high schools and middle schools,” said Sementi. “Now that we’ve got some positive momentum we want to keep it rolling.”

As far as academic success, “It’s working for us. We took what was good about the small schools and are making it fit West Valley,” said Sementi. “We’re pleased that our kids are getting a solid education and that every kid is going to have the opportunity to go on to some type of post-high school education, whether it’s four-year school, community college or the military. That’s a noble goal. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot further along than we were.”