Educator Offers Lesson on Alternative School
The Providence Journal, January 25, 2001
KEENE, N.H. (AP) - A high school principal whose unorthodox methods nearly got him run out of town, then made him subject of a book and television movie, is coming back with a new plan for a new type of school.
Dennis Littky, who served as principal of Thayer High School in Winchester from 1981 to 1994, is working on a plan to open an alternative high school for the eight-town Monadnock Regional School District.
Littky, now director of the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, in Providence, said Tuesday during a meeting with teachers the idea for the Monadnock Regional School is based on the one in Providence.
The idea has attracted interest from charitable foundations and school districts across the country. Littky is helping open a dozen similar schools in New Orleans; Chicago; Detroit; Oakland, Calif., and other cities.
“This is my first venture back as an educator,” he said. “It’s kind of cool.”
Compared to a traditional high school, the proposed school would have smaller classes, fewer structured lessons, emphasis on internships, and an enrollment of 50 to 100 students.
Littky’s idea is “huge, gigantic,” said Dixie Gurian, chairwoman of the Monadnock Regional School Board. “It’s about options and alternatives.”
Curtis Cardine, superintendent of the district, said he is considering ideas like this because surveys show parents and teachers want more individualized learning, smaller classes and more options.
He said parents and students who don’t like the alternative still will have regular high school.
At the Providence school, students follow individual programs crafted for “their passion,” Littky said. All students must take reading, math and other basics. Those classes may take the form of independent studies, courses at a local college or other approved methods.
Internships are the heart of the program, Littky said. Students spend two days a week working with a professional mentor in an area of interest.
If the Monadnock district chooses to open such a school, Littky would work from Providence to provide support and help with staff training.
Gurian said Monadnock’s financial problems, including hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt due to accounting errors, shouldn’t get in the way of academic progress.
“Voters will say, ‘You need to focus on the deficit,’ and they’re right,” but that shouldn’t stop academic improvements, Gurian said. “These needs run concurrently.”
Littky, is a former New York City educator whose high energy leadership and unconventional methods helped produce dramatic improvements at the Winchester school, including a reduced dropout rate. The school’s teachers won praise nationally.
But he was fired in 1986 by the Winchester School Board, which disapproved of his management philosophy and said he allowed too much familiarity with pupils. Littky called those his strengths, and residents rallied behind him.
Littky won a temporary injunction in court, allowing him to remain until a town vote was taken and his job was saved.
Littky was the subject of the book Teacher and was played by L.A. Law star Michael Tucker in the 1992 NBC movie A Town Torn Apart.