Broad Ripple High School Student Speaks Out About Small Schools and Change

Ronald was a member of the Broad Ripple High School student research team. Here, in an interview with WKCD, he shares his thoughts about the research process and changing his large high school into smaller schools.

The thing about doing the survey is that we already knew a lot of the information. The surveys just put a number and a percentage symbol in front of it. For example, we already knew that only half the teachers communicate with their students well, or that most kids live in single-parent homes. We already knew that only about a quarter of the students who start in ninth grade graduate. We already knew that half of the students don't even know what small schools are.

The point isn't so much what we learned from the surveys but what we do with the information. There's no point if nobody's going to use the results to make something good happen. There's no point in me making a cement block if nobody's going to make a building out of it. It's complicated, but the analogy's right.

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We had this obligation, as soon as we joined the research team, to get the word out about small schools and get people thinking about what they were. Until this year I didn't know anything about small learning communities. I think it's our job to get the word out there, since there's so many of us dropping out of school every day. Even though a lot of people are against small learning communities, they're here to help us and motivate us; it might work, it might not work, we haven't done it yet. We just have to push the button and try it out.

Still, I'm worried that we don't have all the facts. You should have proof that something's going to work before you start. Do we have proof from other cities that you can really break large high schools into small schools without causing new troubles?

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If teachers love what they do, then they'll do anything for their students. Even those teachers that seem like they don't care about us, they still put that assignment on the board. They tell us how to do the assignment, they help us learn. It's a 50-50 process, we've got to work too. We do our 50 sitting in class and paying attention, turning in our homework even though we don't want to.

Putting us in small learning communities keeps us with the same teachers and the same students. If you keep students and teachers together for a period of time, then the teacher learns with that student—what his strengths and weaknesses are. If, as a teacher you can key into the student's strong points and work on the weak ones, it doesn't matter if you care or not. You can come to work everyday and not care, but as long as you come here to teach, we're fine with that.

I'm not worried about the teachers that are backing us up; I'm worried about the ones who aren't. Even those teachers that act like they don't care, I bet there was a time when they did care. They loved to teach, and they loved to help. Can small schools bring that back, I wonder?

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Small schools isn't a transition that you go into alone, or with just a small group of people. It's a unity thing, if one gets touched all get touched. If one person in the family goes broke, everybody's going to try and help that one. If one person in this school is slipping, then everybody is slipping, and we all need to work to help each other. One person can't do it all. We've got to do it together. And breaking up into a bunch of small schools doesn't mean that everyone is divided. It's just a bunch of small schools in one bigger school, it's like a whole family in one house.

We're proof that a small school in a larger school can work—if it's a good small school. Our research team, we're all kids in the humanities school, and look at us. We're all getting over a 3.0, we're all going to graduate, and we're all going on to some form of higher education. Now look at the kids who aren't in the humanities school. They're graduating with less than a 2.5. It shows that whatever's going on in the humanities school is right on, and we should try and get that going with other kids.

There's a lot of raw talent in this school, just walking around on two legs in high-top sneakers. So they're going to have to create schools that cater to a really talented and really diverse community of people. Small schools run off the philosophy that you can't make everyone happy. One guy wants an apple, the other wants a banana, the other wants a pear. You can't be going around buying eighteen different pieces of fruit. You learn better when you focus on what you're interested in.

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Change has to rest on a solid foundation, a foundation built around what people are good at and what they're interested in doing. If the foundation isn't there, you have to build it first, as part of the change, or everything you try is going to crumble. A stable foundation means stable workers, people who are committed and who believe that this project is going to work.

A stable foundation also means putting the students, not the structure, first. When the small school plan started at our school, I had a bunch of teachers coming at me, telling me their opinions about how this or that would work for students. But they didn't really know, they don't have any real experience with small schools. And they mustn't assume that just because they are a teacher or an adult, they know better than us what's best for us.

No, it has to start with the students. If the whole point of small schools is to make learning more personal to the student, well nobody knows better how we learn than us. We also know that students learn best when they feel involved. Ever since we were kids we've wanted to do it ourselves. We wanted to learn how to walk and we wanted to learn to do everything ourselves. We need teachers to be our guides.

Click here to read roundtable discussion with Northwest H.S. students.

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