West Clermont school district, Ohio

Amelia High School and Glen Este High School served the West Clermont school district east of Cincinnati and were, of course, rivals. When West Clermont officials conducted one of many public meetings to promote their plan to restructure the two schools—one of the boldest ever attempted at a suburban school district—they ran into unexpected opposition from Amelia parents: The “Small Schools” brochure was printed with a purple cover. Purple is one of Glen Este’s school colors.

“Our first step in the improvement process was to listen,” says Mary Ellen Steele-Pierce, assistant superintendent of the district. “What we heard early on was that parents and students alike are very attached to the traditional high-school model.”

West Clermont Superintendent Michael Ward frequently worked the phones nights and weekends assuring parents that officials at the highest levels understood their concerns and supported the transformation of the system. Parents needed to be convinced that the end result would not be a vocational school, but rather a deeper, richer educational experience for all of West Clermont’s students.

Educational studies consistently show that schools carrying a large number of students tend to drop too many of them on the way to graduation. Even as the national educational conversation remains focused on elementary and middle schools, it’s often at the high-school level where the battle is lost.

In large, impersonal schools, students feel like a number because, frequently, they are. Stars are noticed. Troublemakers are notorious. Too often, the kids in between are ignored. But students in smaller schools report more satisfaction with their education and have consistently higher performance in measurable areas, such as grades, attendance, and graduation rates.

With more than 40 percent of students at Glen Este earning 2.0 or lower grade-point average, West Clermont officials decided to reinvent their schools around a single proposition: Every student should be known by someone.

In the process, two struggling schools became 10 that, today, are good examples of what’s possible when learning becomes more personalized.

Starting in fall 2002, each of the two large campuses became home to five smaller schools organized around areas of interest ranging from science and technology to world studies to communications to performing arts. Though they specialize in some areas, all students receive a thorough core curriculum, often using areas of interest as a means of relating to core studies. Because schools are smaller, teachers can coordinate—a science experiment can be the basis of an English assignment or an art project.

“[We’re] attempting to do what’s been done nowhere in the United States—to create an urban school district where all the high schools are world class, and to recreate a suburban school district where ‘above average’ is not good enough,” says Joe Nathan, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for School Change in Minneapolis.

The efforts at West Clermont are being duplicated in the nearby Cincinnati school district and many other communities around the country as more school districts discover that big things can happen with a willingness to get a little smaller.