Parents praise charter school plan for WCS

She’s got another granddaughter there too, and “they’re not going to let her fail.” She said, “Without that school, they probably would’ve dropped out without even trying.”

She and others spoke to the North Wasco County School District 21 board last Thursday during a public hearing on WCS’s request to become a charter school. The school will vote on the request at its June 14 meeting.

WCS Principal Brian Goodwin was blunt about why he was seeking charter school status. He’s had a supportive superintendent for years in the person of Candy Armstrong, but she’s planning on retiring in a few years and he doesn’t know if the next superintendent will be as gung-ho for his work.

By forming a charter school, that protects his budget and ensures it won’t get cut, since the charter school would be a stand-alone school. It would get 95 percent of the funding per student that traditional high schools would get.

Goodwin shared a story about how he first discovered the power of letting students study things that interest them. The topic was the 14th Amendment, which has the “equal treatment under law” clause.

An otherwise disinterested student found a way that the topic resonated with him, went home and cranked out a five-page paper. His topic? The unfairness of how the teacher’s pop machine had cheaper soda than the student pop machine.

It caused enough of an upset at the school that the principal removed the pop machine out of the staff room.

Also forming his interest in students, Goodwin said, was a tour of duty in Iraq, where he saw broken small towns that used to be vibrant. “Something happens and it unravels like a sweater,” he said. People can turn against each other with tragic consequences.

It made him realize how fragile the threads are that hold any community together, and the group he was working with, students, was how he saw his role in making the town stronger.

He talked about how he got the approval to start an alternative school, where he scooped up the students who attended what he called “smoking tree high school,” referring to a once-popular spot near the high school.

Some of the students who came to the new alternative school were homeless, or addicted to drugs.

The fears at the time were that the kids wouldn’t show up, and if they did, they wouldn’t stay.

But he soon had a waiting list for the 55 available slots at the school. Six months after he started, an observer noted, “Your kids don’t have cliques. They help each other.”

WCS secretary Jillian McNeal said she dropped out of high school, then went on to get her GED and attend community college.

She thinks she could have achieved a lot more, at an earlier age, had she been surrounded by the kind of caring people who staff WCS.

WCS uses project-based learning, which is completely different from traditional learning, she said.

Staff works with individual students to come up with interesting and valuable projects that help the community and also tie back to core academic subjects.

Teacher Krystal Klebes said projects are individually tailored so students learn compassion, civic duty and responsibility. Each student has a check-in teacher who keeps track of their work.

They are responsible for doing six 16-hour projects every six weeks. Student-facilitated projects are developed, planned and executed by students, and include projects like Zumba classes.

Teacher-facilitated projects include water quality testing. “My day and my student’s days are rarely the same,” she said.

Graduated WCS student Carrie McCowan said she struggled with school, tried online studying but it didn’t work, and finally went to WCS.

But, she said, “let’s face it, they have a really bad reputation: ‘They’re the worst, they’re deviant, they get modified diplomas.’”

She went anyway and loved the project-based learning model.

The projects themselves are challenges, but even getting to that point also required thinking. Students had to learn “how to turn things we loved into a project, and that itself was a challenge.”

It meant taking what they were interested in and extracting the academic applications.

At a traditional school, kids are worried about fitting in and sports, and they’re not focused on education, McCowan said.

At WCS, education is at the fore. “There’s nothing better than to go to school where teachers are excited to work with you,” she said.

Kiera Henderson said she was failing a lot of classes, tried online but it didn’t work, and then got in to WCS.

“I just jumped right in, started working, I’ve never been so excited to go to school in my life.”

Students can go at their own pace and learn real-life experiences, she said. She went on the school’s trip to American Samoa and said it was a life-changing experience.

She graduated a year early, at 16, and is now 17 and working as a certified nurse’s assistant at the Oregon Veterans’ Home to become a doctor.

Jasper Moriarty called Goodwin her “guardian angel,” then turned to him and instructed him not to cry at the accolade.

She said she grew up in a family without high school graduates, and had been getting Ds and Fs since fifth grade.

“Education didn’t inspire me at all,” she said.

She was in online school, but it wasn’t working. She ran into Goodwin, who pitched WCS. When she joined, she expected to be kicked out in a month because she was very rebellious.

Instead, “It was a miracle. I discovered what I was good at, I discovered I have a gift for science and medical.”

She said, “I come from a very rough childhood. I did some stuff that was not great that involved addiction.” WCS helped her to be involved in the community.

Parent Tanya Lindsey said her daughter had fallen behind in school and wanted to quit. She wanted to just get an entry level job somewhere. Lindsey believes there’s only so much a parent can do to encourage their child “because they think you’re biased.”

But once her daughter got to WCS, “Watching the transformation in her was amazing,” Lindsey said emotionally. She’s proud of her achievements and she would like to see WCS grow.

Current student Bryce McBain said he’s only been at WCS a month, but already “things are changing drastically in my life.”

He struggles with social anxiety and motivation. He’s tried many schools, but at WCS, “Now I want to learn. I realize graduation is 100 percent in reach.”

With project-based learning, he finds he retains what he’s studied. At the other high school, he said, he forgot what he learned “the next day.”

Anyssa Campos said she and her sister were in 25 foster homes. Her sister started WCS with one credit her sophomore year, and Anyssa had eight, as a junior.

The school has helped them with everything from getting rides to getting to appointments.

She said of her sister, “She just had a baby, I’m working a lot, and we’re gonna graduate.”