A Report on the Small Learning Community Initiative at West

I attended the West High PTSO meeting last Monday night (3/1/04) and wanted to share with the group some information about West's Small Learning Communities (SLC's) initiative.  Although this information only directly effects students in the West High area, a number of parents in other parts of the District have expressed an interest in being kept informed about what is going on at West.

The idea behind the SLC initiative is to reduce the achievement gap between minority and majority students and increase success experiences for all students at West.  The principal, Loren Rathert, regularly makes the point that "... students who succeed at West are the ones who find ways to make it small."  The SLC's make West small for everyone by breaking the school into four learning communities.  Each learning community consists of approximately 125 students from each grade.  Students within each of the four learning communities have the same unit principal, guidance counselors, psychologist and social worker for all of their years at West.   This initiative began this year funded in part with a grant from the US Dept. of Education (ED Grant #V215L032057).  Students were assigned randomly to one of the four SLC's, and next year's incoming freshmen will be divided up and assigned to one of the four existing learning communities.

This year, student assignment to the SLC's has not had any effect on class assignments or course offerings.  However, for next year's incoming freshmen, there will be a change in the way that the curriculum is delivered.  These students will take their core courses -- science, math, English and social studies -- exclusively with students in their learning community.  This core course grouping within learning community will be expanded to include tenth graders the following year.  According to Mr. Rathert, the school is still in the process of trying to figure out which English and social studies courses to offer those tenth graders in 2005/06 (the implication being that the SLC's will not be able to support the same variety of course offerings).  Because all of the students in a learning community will have the same core teachers, it is hoped that this approach will foster better communication amongst faculty, so that they can respond more quickly when a student is having difficulties.

If you would like to learn more about the SLC initiative, you can visit this link:

http://fcae.nova.edu/~kamalros/West/SLC-Home.htm

You can even find a link to the PowerPoint presentation that was shown at the meeting.

At this meeting, I also discovered that West is going to be adding a "whole" math curriculum to its course offerings at some point in the future.  The school will be adding Core+ math, which is currently one of the three math curriculums in use now at East High.


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