Kent School Built For Unconventional Ideas

KENT - Imagine a junior high where students don't have to take textbooks home.

Where bells don't ring at the end of each class.

Where there are no student lockers.

Where shared tables have replaced individual desks.

Where faster or slower learners aren't put in special classes.

Where enrichment classes are supporting a food bank and restoring a ghost town.

You've imagined Kent's newest school, Cedar Heights Junior High.

Opened in September, Cedar Heights was built to accommodate new teaching methods. No single innovation may be unique to the school, but Principal Janis Bechtel and her handpicked staff seized upon the opening of the building as an opportunity to make changes that add up to a different kind of schooling.

It's a kind of schooling envisioned in the Kent School District's new strategic plan.

With 1,100 students - slightly above the building's capacity - the staff has worked hard, in Bechtel's words, "to create smallness out of bigness."

To make the Covington-area school more nurturing, Bechtel recruited teachers who showed as much interest in the needs of individual students as in the curriculum. "They had to be kid-centered, first and foremost. . . . Junior highs, for a long time, have had people who have been more content-oriented than they needed to be at this age."

"Smallness" is created by putting each grade level in its own wing of the building, by dividing grades into smaller teaching teams, by assigning each student to a small advisory class led by the same staff member for three years. Seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders change classes at different times, and eat lunch separately.

Teaching teams meet daily, sometimes inviting parents and students to join them.

Plans to build lockers were scrapped, Bechtel said, because of the administrative "nightmare" they pose. A tremendous amount of staff time is devoted to assigning lockers, changing lock combinations and, increasingly often, searching for contraband. Without lockers, Cedar Heights' hallways are less crowded and students can change classes more quickly.

Many students are miffed at having to carry their coats and other possessions with them through the school day, but understand the security reasons for eliminating lockers.

"We feel safe," said eighth-grader Todd Hameter.

"You know people can't pull out a knife or a gun," said his classmate, Lindsay Larson. "These days, you don't know."

One reason Cedar Heights can do without lockers is that students don't have to lug armloads of textbooks. In what may be the school's most startling innovation, texts simply aren't issued to students in most classes.

At a time when a typical textbook costs around $35, and when many teachers are moving away from textbook-and-lecture instruction, Cedar Heights is redirecting some of its textbook money to buy laser discs, novels and computer software.

"Kids are more visual now," Bechtel said. "You can fight it or you can responsibly work with it."

Textbooks are available for classroom use, but those in English, science and some social-studies classes aren't normally taken home.

Students keep textbooks at home for eighth-grade health, ninth-grade world history and math at all levels. Instead of bringing the books to school with them, they use a classroom set for in-school use; the classroom set is shared by four or more classes.

When homework is assigned in those classes, "You just bring the page number home," said ninth-grader Chris Rouillard.

For homework, Norm Hurt's seventh-grade science students may be asked to analyze a science article from the newspaper or a magazine. Or they may take home a one-page essay and complete a work sheet based on it.

Is academic rigor being lost? Not according to Hurt, who cites research showing that junior-high students don't complete much homework assigned from textbooks anyway.

"This is a gradual transition for students going from the elementary level to the junior-high-school level," Hurt said. "We don't want to shock them with having to do a lot of writing and reading."

Teachers decide, for each subject and grade level, whether it is important for students to have their own textbooks. For most classes, the answer has been no.

"We looked at whether we could afford to have a classroom set of books here and at home," Bechtel explained. "How much were we going to use texts to drive our curriculum? Were we going to use it as a resource or as a Bible? Our staff wanted to use it as one of many resources."

Priscilla Kampa-Smithhart wasn't sure what her ninth-grade son and eighth-grade daughter would encounter when they transferred from a small private school to Cedar Heights. The children have found their classes academically challenging.

"I'm so impressed," said Kampa-Smithhart, "because I expected a public school to be much colder. In spite of the size, I feel - and both children feel - they're nurturing and caring."