A decade ago, all eyes were on Shelbyville, at least in the education and media worlds.
A Time Magazine cover story made the high school the face of “Dropout Nation.” It was an epidemic that was sweeping the nation at the time – one out of three public high school students weren’t graduating.
But because Superintendent David Adams supported state representative Luke Messer’s bill which in essence raised the legal dropout age to 18 from 16, and admitted Shelbyville indeed had a dropout problem when many other superintendents refused to, Shelbyville became the poster child.
“I should have been like all of the other superintendents and said, ‘No, we don’t have a dropout problem. What are you talking about?’” Adams said Monday sitting in his office at Shelbyville Central Schools, where he’s still superintendent. “But sure we do. If you’ve got any dropouts it’s too many.”
The point of that 2006 article was that no community, whether it be big and urban or small and rural like Shelbyville, had escaped the problem.
The graduation rate at Shelbyville hovered around 75 percent at the time. That rate peaked at 98 percent during the 2013-14 school year. Last year, it was 96 percent.
What follow-ups to Time’s story – including a segment on Oprah – suggested is the unwelcome fame ignited a flame under the butts of the Shelbyville Central Schools administration. But that’s a fire Adams said had already been lit.
He had been with the district for five years at that point – three years as the high school principal and two as superintendent.
Since then, the district has implemented a number of initiatives and programs that have increased the graduation rate by more than 20 percent.
Efforts include an alternative to suspension and expulsion program, a credit recovery lab and an alternative school, which opened its doors in 2006.
‘Another opportunity to be successful’
It would have taken Holton Curry a lot longer to graduate if not for the district’s alternative school.
Curry spends about three hours every morning at the local Boys Club, where the alternative school is housed, working on a laptop to finish his remaining classes.
The 18-year-old senior plans to join the Army.
He decided to go to basic training over the summer, so he knew he was going to be about three weeks behind when he got back, and he had already failed some classes his freshman year at the high school.
“I decided it’d be a good idea for me to come here so I could get caught up on all of my classes,” Curry said.
And thanks to the alternative school, it didn’t take him long to catch up.
“About three weeks,” he said. “It’s really easy to stay caught up and do your work. It sometimes takes, like, a week at most to finish a class. But it’s also really easy to get behind if you don’t stay on your stuff.”
The idea for the school stemmed from many students not being able to function well in a traditional school setting, which led to many dropping out.
“Some kids just kind of struggle in a regular school,” Adams said. “They’re good kids, but for whatever reason, the normal setup of a high school is hard for them.”
He pointed to issues with peers as a big reason.
“Life happens,” he said. “So you get kids sometimes who will get pregnant or have to work. There are a number of things that happen in life that don’t fit perfectly into the round hole.”
Most students in the program complete their freshman and sophomore years at the high school and then finish up at the alternative school.
“That program has helped us raise our graduation rate significantly,” Adams said. “A lot of kids who would have had to drop out or would have been dropouts go there. It sometimes takes a little longer, but we get a lot of graduates out of that program.”
Curry wouldn’t have had a choice, he said. He would have eventually gotten his diploma. But with the alternative school, he’s actually on track to graduate early.
“My parents would kill me,” he said about not graduating.
Curry comes for the morning session and then goes straight to work at an Amazon shipping factory in town.
The worst part about the alternative school is being separated from his friends at the high school, but it’s worth it, he said. He has no desire to walk in the high school’s graduation ceremony, even though students at the alternative school do have that option.
“If I graduate early, I might just leave and go back for AIT (Advanced Individual Training) and airborne school,” he said.
Eventually, Curry wants to go to college to be a diesel mechanic.
Teacher Melissa Lakes said Curry is an example of a success story.
Some of the students in the program will spend half their day at the Boys Club and then go over to the high school for other programs such as a JAG (Jobs for America’s Graduates) class, or complete internships. But many of them work full-time jobs, like Curry.
There is often a negative connotation placed on alternative schools, but that’s not how Lakes sees it.
“To me, it’s just a different kind of setting,” she said. “You have bright, capable kids who, for whatever reason, have not necessarily been successful in a traditional setting, so we are trying to give them another opportunity to be successful.”
The alternative school uses Apex Learning, a web-based, self-paced program.
Students who graduate from the program go on to do a variety of things. Some attend community college or university, while others pursue trade school or the workforce.
“It is exactly the same,” Lakes said. “They’re still Shelbyville High School students. They still get a Shelbyville High School diploma. Their transcript looks no different.”
Her job as one of two teachers is to monitor the students and set weekly benchmarks to make sure they’re on track to complete all of their classes.
“We do that biweekly,” Lakes said. “We sit down and we talk about seniors, and for those kids who make us a little nervous, we try to come up with interventions. The whole mentality is to catch them before they fall.”
Lakes has headed the program since its inception in 2006. She runs it and works with the other part-time teacher to make sure the 50 students in it meet all graduation requirements.
Lakes grew up in Shelbyville and has lived in the community her whole life. She was a new teacher when the Time article was published.
“For me it was mixed emotions,” she said. “You don’t want a negative spotlight placed on the place that you live and work. But the flip side of it, for me as an optimist, is that I like us being able to say, ‘We weren’t afraid to acknowledge that we had a problem, but look at all the things we’ve done to try and make an improvement.’”
Meeting all students’ needs
Another one of those improvements was an alternative to suspension and expulsion program, which Adams helped implement not long after he arrived in the district.
“When I first came in, I thought that we were suspending and expelling way too many students,” he said. “I looked at the statistics at the middle school and they were suspending a ton of kids.”
He admits sometimes you have to take a kid out of a building for a cool-off period.
“But it was being way overused and was just an ineffective tool,” he said.
So one of the first things Adams’ administration did was put in place the alternative to suspension program.
Before this program, any time a student was suspended, they’d be out for a few days. For each day they were out, they would lose about 2 percent off their grade.
“What happens is if you suspend a kid a few times, you can ruin their semester and they’re going to get Fs,” Adams said.
Now, there’s a location outside the schools where students who are suspended can go and make up all of their work if they wish to.
“We still get our point across, but at the same time, we didn’t want to academically hurt students,” he said.
The district also offers an alternative to an expulsion program, which is mostly online, but allows students to continue to earn credits if they’re out of school for a semester or even an entire school year. A teacher is assigned to monitor them as well.
“What we know is the further you get behind, the more likely you are to become a dropout,” he said.
Because of that, there’s also a credit lab at the high school which allows students to make up credits they’re missing during the school day.
But in order to fix the dropout problem, Adams said, a school district must also focus on more than just the high school.
“Everybody wants to blame the high school when there’s a dropout problem. We know that,” he said. “But the fact is kids decide whether or not they’re going to be a dropout by about the time they’re in the third grade. So we can’t make this into a high school phenomenon.”
The district has a data card for every student, starting in elementary school. They conduct beginning of the year, middle of the year and end of the year testing on all students to see where they’re at.
“If you’re unsuccessful through elementary school, you start getting a bad attitude,” Adams said.
To make sure the transition from middle school to high school goes smoothly for students dubbed “at-risk,” the district put in place the CORE Academy.
“Instead of just giving them a schedule and setting them loose in the high school, they go into the CORE Academy,” he said.
Freshmen will take many of their classes in the same classroom, but still move around the building for some of their electives.
“The goal is obviously that you’re eventually out in all seven of your classes,” Adams said.
Also, now, instead of having guidance counselors and social workers at all levels, the district has assigned its social workers to the elementary schools. The idea is they can focus on problems outside the school setting and tag “at-risk” kids early on, while guidance counselors at the middle and high school can focus on more of the educational aspects, like scheduling and life after high school.
“We are always looking at ourselves, evaluating ourselves and trying to figure out how do we better meet the needs of all of the kids in our school system?” Adams said. “We don’t just replay the same school year over and over again.”
While the graduation rate has seemingly gone up, many changes have been made to the state’s system over the past decade, including the way graduates are reported.
The Indiana Department of Education stopped listing on its website the number of students who received GEDs during the 2007-08 school year. It also stopped listing the number of dropouts during the 2012-13 school year.
But Adams said SCS still has dropouts, and the reasons haven’t changed much in the last decade.
“It’s very hard for schools to overcome what happens outside in society,” he said. “Public schools, we open our doors to everybody. And when you open your door to everybody, every issue – every good thing and every bad thing – is let in. Schools tend to be a microcosm of your community.”
As for battling the negative image the Time article created for the high school and the community overall, Adams has put it behind him and he thinks the community has, too.
He said requests for interviews has gone down significantly over the past couple years, but he still gets calls from TV news crews from time to time asking if they can come down and do a story. His answer is always no.
Today, some eyes are still on Shelbyville. But not as the “Dropout Nation” school. A number of school districts have visited SCS for ideas about how to successfully run a school corporation, Adams said.
“I know just from dealing with a lot of superintendents and people throughout the state that there are a lot of people who really respect our school system and what we’ve been able to do here,” he said. “We just want to drop it, put it behind us and move on with the future.”
Reasons kids still drop out in 2016:
“Kids are more likely to drop out if their parents or siblings are dropouts,” Shelbyville Central Schools Superintendent David Adams said. “I think that’s always an issue. What did mom and dad do?”
There’s no escaping the social issues.
“Kids are young and sometimes they make bad choices,” Adams said. “There are a number of issues. They may get pregnant or they may have to leave to go work for whatever reason.”