High School Stands Apart
by Chuck Slothower
February 14, 2010
Located in a south wing at Durango High School, an alternative education program stands apart. It has its own teachers, students and curriculum. Durango Big Picture High School, as the program is called, is more than halfway through its first year. Students work on projects, solve math equations at their own pace and help each other with problems both academic and social.
On Wednesday, a typical day last week, class began with teacher Manuel Sanchez – whom the students call “San-chez” – leading an exercise called “pick me up” after calling roll. Students introduced themselves, rated their mood on a 1-to-10 scale and, on this day, named their favorite breakfast.
Cayton Ferguson, a ninth-grader who skips down the hallways and favors black clothing, said she was “about an eight.” Her favorite breakfast: hash browns, preferably from Denny’s. Not everybody gave such a cheery report. One girl said she was a “one” – something about going to a psychologist.
Sanchez said he was about an eight. He told the students, “Those of you that are having a low-number day, remember, there’s people you can talk to.” Cayton, 15, who attended Miller Middle School last year, said the Big Picture school fits her learning style.
“I can’t take in information and put it back on paper,” she said. Big Picture also reduces the impacts of her attention deficit disorder, Cayton said. “I function normally in here,” she said.
9-R’s latest alternative Durango Big Picture High School’s lineage can be traced to Excel Charter School, an independent public school that in 2006 became part of Durango School District 9-R after suffering from low enrollment, high staff and student turnover and inadequate financing.
The district revamped the charter school into a program called Durango Academy. After months of intensive planning led by DHS Principal Diane Lashinsky, district officials decided to change tack again, adopting a new curriculum modeled on Big Picture Learning. The program was developed in the mid-1990s in Providence, R.I.
“What I like about the model is that the learning originates from students’ interests,” Lashinsky said. “So the students have the opportunity to take what they’re intrinsically motivated about and have that guide how they learn in high school.”
The first Big Picture school, known as The Met, enrolled mostly at-risk African-American and Latino students who did not fit in conventional schools, the organization says on its Web site.
Many local Big Picture students also seem to have struggled in regular schools. Tajid Person, a 15-year-old freshman, said he almost failed out of Escalante Middle School last year. “I do not do so well in traditional school,” Tajid said. “Big Picture is more hands-on, and I’m more of a hands-on learner. I like it here a lot.”
Some Big Picture students simply prefer the self-paced learning style. Jasmine Neves, 16, a sophomore, said she did well at DHS last year. But she switched to Big Picture because she wanted “something different.” “I wanted something that would challenge me, let me go at my own speed,” she said.
Lashinsky said the Big Picture model works for “anyone that wants to learn in a different kind of environment.” “The original Big Picture schools (were) targeted initially at students who were not successful in school,” Lashinsky said. “But that’s not specifically the population we’re targeting, and we’ve also found in other schools around the country, it’s not only for that population.”
Nationwide, Big Picture schools enroll 9,000 students, and an additional 7,000 attend them in other countries. Durango Big Picture enrolls 47 students in ninth and 10th grades, a fraction of the 1,393 students at DHS and short of the 60 or so school officials had hoped for. School officials plan to add 11th and 12th grades over the next two years, becoming a four-year high school by 2011-12.
It will be years before data emerges about Durango Big Picture’s college placement rate. But nationally, 95 percent of students at Big Picture schools were accepted into colleges in 2006-07, Briana Masterson, spokeswoman for Big Picture Learning in Providence, said in an e-mail message. Of those, more than 60 percent have completed a degree or remain enrolled in higher-education institutions.
Three 9-R teachers work full time at Big Picture, in addition to a DHS special-education teacher who helps at Big Picture. The program was budgeted at $421,000 this year but likely will spend less because enrollment fell short of the budgeted amount, said Laine Gibson, 9-R’s chief financial officer.
All Big Picture students are expected to intern with local employers two days a week. On Thursday, Cayton paged through the company’s Web site in the marketing department at ProfitStreams in Durango while Internet radio played in the background. The company, a spinoff of Mercury Payment Systems, provides restaurant reservation systems and other high-tech tools for businesses. Cayton has created two animated help videos for ProfitStream’s customers as part of an internship.
Some students have not yet found internships, but it’s not for a lack of effort, said Alain Henry, a Big Picture administrator. “Those students that are not in internships currently all have struggled for a variety of reasons,” he said.
In one video Cayton created, titled “How does search-engine marketing help your business?” an animated man and woman discuss how to get businesses noticed by search engines such as Google.
Walker Thompson, who leads ProfitStreams’ Durango office, called Big Picture a “killer program” because it exposes students at a young age to the business world. “There are so many opportunities beyond the classroom,” he said.
Kricket Lewis, who works with Cayton in the marketing department, said the freshman is learning real-world skills. “It really is how we work,” she said. “It’s collaboration, it’s communication, it’s problem solving.” Cayton had a bit of a leg-up at ProfitStreams – her mother, Rhonda, works in sales – but she said she enjoyed the laid-back office culture. “It’s work and play,” she said. “It’s awesome.”
Different requirements The school district is eager to publicize Big Picture as students and parents choose schools for 2010-11. Besides DHS and Big Picture, families in Durango also can choose Animas High School, a charter institution that opened in August 2009 with 77 freshmen. Like Big Picture, AHS – which is not part of the school district – offers a project-based curriculum paired with internships, small class sizes and close student-teacher relationships.
Students at Big Picture do not receive traditional grades. Projects they complete are rated according to whether they exceed, meet or fall below expectations. Those ratings in turn are converted into class credit and a GPA for the purpose of college admissions. “We were looking for a truly different way for students to be able to go through school and still be able to meet the rigorous 9-R graduation requirements, but to be able to come at those graduation requirements in a completely different way,” Lashinsky said. Next school year, if repairs can be completed in time, Big Picture will move to the 9-R building at 12th Street and East Second Avenue that once housed Excel.
“Big Picture is definitely not a school for every kind of learner, for every kind of student,” Lashinsky said. “It’s designed to meet a specific need for a specific type of learner, and we think we have a good number of those in Durango.”