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WALES

Oak Hill test scores on the rise

Changes lead to improvements

By Matthew Stone mstone@centralmaine.com
Staff Writer

WALES — Five years ago, Oak Hill High School introduced Advanced Placement classes, and teachers opened them up to all students with the necessary coursework on their transcripts.

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Teacher Patti LeBlanc talks to students in Advanced Placement English class on Thursday at Oak Hill High School in Wales. They are from left, Stephanie Bouchard, Emily Poirier and Nik Moring.

Staff photo by Joe Phelan

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The school stopped tracking students into classes based on their presumed academic ability.

And teachers started turning in their class syllabi to have them vetted by experts, who made sure the course content lined up with Maine’s academic standards.
Over time, the school’s performance on standardized tests began to rise.

Later this week, an administrator and two teachers will share the tale of Oak Hill High School’s turnaround at an education reform conference in New Hampshire. Oak Hill is one of three Maine high schools that will be highlighted at the regional gathering called “High School Redesign in Action.”

Oak Hill’s redesign started when the school, for a second year, fell short of making “adequate yearly progress,” a federally required benchmark, on standardized tests. As a condition for accepting federal Title I funds, Oak Hill needed to form a school improvement plan.

Principal Patricia Doyle was settling into her new role at the high school — which serves about 520 students from Litchfield, Sabattus and Wales — as improvement planning got under way.

At the heart of Oak Hill’s turnaround, she said, was a realization that all students — not just the academically ambitious — needed a curriculum that prepared them for college and the workplace.

“We decided that the core curriculum was a college- (and) career-ready curriculum, and we decided we needed to offer it to all students,” Doyle said.

A key piece of the puzzle was literacy, she said.

“I just knew that (students) didn’t read assignments,” Doyle said, “and I knew that was either because the practices we were using enabled students not to read or they were non-readers.”

Using funds the school was awarded to execute its improvement plan, Oak Hill High School underwent a literacy audit to find out what could be done to address the school’s reading problem.

At the same time, teachers from all subject areas started taking part in literacy-oriented training.

“Everybody needed to be a part of it,” Doyle said. “It wasn’t just an English thing. It was across the curriculum.”

The literacy-oriented professional development became “three years of pretty intense training in a variety of literacy strategies,” she said.

Over the past three years, Doyle said, the “intense intervention” has started paying dividends. The average percentage of students scoring proficiently on math and reading tests has jumped 12 percentage points during that period, according to state testing data released last week.

An average of 45 percent of Oak Hill’s students met math and reading benchmarks during the 2008-09 school year, up from 33 percent in 2006-07.

Oak Hill has yet to make adequate yearly progress and come off Maine’s Continuous Improvement Priority Schools list.

But the school is showing gains, Doyle noted, and will stick with the improvement strategies it’s started implementing these past five years.
“I think we really want to work with what we have and make sure it’s sustainable,” Doyle said.

Nearly 300 teachers and administrators from five New England states will attend the conference where Doyle and Oak Hill teachers Patti LeBlanc and Julie Boucher will present. It takes place Thursday and Friday in Nashua, N.H.

The conference is an attempt at connecting high schools taking a variety of different approaches to reform, said Stephen Abbott, spokesman for the Great Schools Partnership in Portland, the conference organizer.

“Right now, there are schools all across the region who are doing interesting stuff, but they don’t know what schools down the street are doing,” Abbott said. “We want to act as a conduit and bring these schools together.”

Searsport District High School and North Berwick’s Noble High School are the other Maine high schools that will be highlighted at the conference, which was organized through the New England Secondary School Consortium, an initiative launched in 2008 involving Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The consortium is about finding new ways to educate high school students, moving away from “traditional schooling approaches,” said Nick Donohue, president of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, the consortium’s primary funder.

“As a culture, we really need a whole lot more people succeeding,” he said. “We look back at the current model for schooling, it’s that old industrial model.”

Matthew Stone — 623-3811, ext. 435
mstone@centralmaine.comi