Since last spring, journalists at ����Ӱ�� have been crossing the U.S. as part of our 2023 High School Road Trip. It has embraced both emerging and established high school models, taking us to 13 schools from Rhode Island to California, Arizona to South Carolina, and in between. 

It has brought us face-to-face with innovation, with programs that promote everything from nursing to aerospace to maritime-themed careers.

At each school, educators seem to be asking one key question: What if we could start over and try something totally new?

What we’ve found represents just a small sample of the incredible diversity that U.S. high schools now offer, but we’re noticing a few striking similarities that educators in these schools, free to experiment with new models, now share. Here are the top eight:

1

They don’t worry about what came before.

In these places, high school looks almost nothing like it did for our parents or grandparents. 

While the seven-period, books-in-a-locker high school, with its comprehensive curriculum, vast extracurriculars and Friday night football games is alive and well and available to most of the nation’s 17 million or so high schoolers, it is no longer the default model. 

Instead, thousands of young people now attend high school each morning in facilities that more closely resemble workplaces, professional training grounds and research labs. Quite often, young people are in actual workplaces for part of their school day, either as apprentices or taking part in something resembling career tourism, trying out jobs to see what fires their imaginations and fits their tastes.

2

They focus intently on exactly what their students need.

Most of these schools are small by design, so the traditional mission of serving thousands of students with countless courses — as well as the requisite menu of after-school activities, such as sports, music, and drama — is out of the question. 

In its place, many new schools now offer one key thing: focus. Intense, unrelenting focus.

At Rhode Island Nurses Institute Middle College in Providence, R.I., students show up for class each morning dressed in scrubs. They spend four years learning the bedrock values and basic skills of the nursing profession, earning college credit before they graduate.

The school’s laser-like focus is perhaps its greatest strength, said Principal Tammy Ferland, a veteran educator. “This is a health care program, a nursing program,” she said. “If you don’t want to be a nurse, if you don’t want to be in health care, then you don’t belong here.”

Students can still play sports or perform in the band — they just need to find those things at their neighborhood school or elsewhere —after they remove their scrubs.

The same focus is on display at Urban Assembly New York Harbor School on Governors Island, a ferry ride south of Manhattan, where the East River meets the Hudson. Students must choose among eight maritime-themed career and technical education pathways before they close out their freshman year. 

Clad in life vests, protective goggles and welders’ masks, students get a chance to earn industry certifications in marine science or technology before graduation — bona fides that help them enter the workforce or pursue further education. 

Most of its students come to the program with an interest in marine biology research, environmental science and aquaculture. And while many pursue these fields, others migrate to ocean engineering, professional diving and even vessel operations. 

3

They embrace internships and personalization.

Many of these new high school models focus less on one industry than on imparting what students need to know about the modern workplace more broadly, through intensive, often personalized, coursework and professional internships. 

At Blue Valley Center for Advanced Professional Studies in Overland Park, KS, students spend about three hours a day working with professionals in one of six industries, from food science to aerospace engineering. 

Housed in a light-filled, three story building that more closely resembles a high-tech office, the program enjoys support from the local school district, which created it as a half-day program that serves only juniors and seniors. 

Students return to their neighborhood high school for required coursework. For accreditation purposes, the district treats the entire enterprise as a class.

“Blue Valley CAPS treated me like a working adult,” said alumna Sophia Porter, who now holds dual degrees in physics and applied mathematics and statistics from Johns Hopkins University and serves as a project manager and test operator for BE-4 engines at the Texas aerospace company Blue Origin.

At The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence, students spend much of what would typically be class time working on personalized projects prescribed by advisors, who follow small groups of just 16 students throughout their high school career, intimately learning about their interests and academic needs. Students also spend much of their four-year career in a series of bespoke internships at local businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions. 

Founded in 1996, The Met is renowned among a brand of progressive educators seeking to create small, personalized high schools around students’ passions and interests. “That’s what the Met taught me,” said Jordan Maddox, class of 2007. “Don’t really limit yourself.”

Maddox admits he initially didn’t quite know what to make of the place. “I remember telling my mother, ‘Mom, this is a daycare for high school students.’ And she was like, ‘Give it a chance. Give it time.’”

These schools also offer a kind of freedom and agency to students that would have been unheard of to their parents.

At One Stone, a tiny private high school near downtown Boise, Idaho, students are deputized to run much of the operation, serving as officers of the board and filling two-thirds of board positions overall.

“A lot of people don’t believe that high school students can do meaningful, big things,” said Teresa Poppen, One Stone’s executive director and co-founder. “And I have always believed that they can do meaningful things when empowered and trusted.”

Or, as recent graduate Abella Cathey put it, “Being treated like an adult is what makes you act like one.”

4

They prepare young people for jobs in emerging industries.

Just as the first public high school offered to educate young people to compete in the high-tech industries of the era, the new breed of high school offers the same promise, only in medicine, aerospace and tech-assisted agriculture.

In Lodi, Calif., as the number of wineries begins to match its status as a major grape-growing powerhouse, the nonprofit San Joaquin A+ has partnered with the Lodi Unified School District and others to create an internship pipeline that gives students real-life learning and experiences across a variety of roles in the winemaking industry.

The partnership turns rural wineries into state-of-the-art classrooms where students spend time inspecting vines, cleaning storage tanks with pressure washers, and setting up tasting. In the end, they learn about the whole business: growing grapes, making wine and selling it.

Across the country, at Anderson Institute of Technology in western South Carolina, students from three districts now get real-world experience early on in their educational careers in preparation for jobs at companies like Bosch, Michelin and Arthrex.

Much like the Blue Valley model, students take core classes at their home high schools, and then commute to AIT to take classes like aeronautics, auto shop, and medicine. They work both in traditional classrooms and “labs” that mimic real-world work environments — an automotive garage, aerospace engineering lab or a surgery room.

“It’s all about giving kids a purpose in life,” said Don Herriott, a local business owner. 

5

They’re rethinking what classrooms, campuses and school days look like.

In many new schools, such personalization takes place among new campus facilities, but in others, students navigate between several physical and virtual sites to attend class — sometimes all in the same day.

In Arizona, the 86 students who attend Phoenix Union City High School choose from a menu of some 500 options that include coursework at the district’s brick-and-mortar schools, its online-only program, internships, jobs, college classes or career training programs.

“The pandemic gave us an entree,” said Chad Gestson, until recently the system’s superintendent. “It enabled us to go to a system with no limits.”

Phoenix Union now operates four small high schools with specific themes, including law enforcement, firefighting, coding and cybersecurity. This fall, Phoenix Educator Preparatory welcomed its first students. It also operates standalone “microschools” housed in existing high schools — they include a program aimed at students working toward admission to highly selective colleges. 

6

They redefine who high school is for.

Just as many schools now redefine what kind of space a high school should occupy, others are rethinking their customer base.

At Roybal Learning Center’s new film and television production magnet high school in Los Angeles, show business industry professionals last fall put up millions to launch a program to give Black, Hispanic and Asian students a pathway into good-paying jobs in the movie industry, helping them become “part of the machinery of storytelling,” said Bryan Lourd, an executive at Creative Artists Agency and the agent of actor George Clooney, a key supporter. 

The school plans to match students with mentors in the industry and eventually develop an apprenticeship program to offer early experience in their chosen field. The goal, said Deborah Marcus, who manages education efforts at Creative Artists Agency, is for graduates to not only land their first job on a crew, but their second and third as well.

7

They serve students of color in a more supportive way.

At New York’s Brooklyn Lab School, social workers visited nearly 100 homes to find students as absenteeism soared after the Covid pandemic.

More than three years later, each Lab School student now has a personal advocate, an advisor who starts each day with a non-academic meeting to build relationships and discuss health or current events over free breakfast.

Two teachers now lead each class, at least one of whom is special education certified, as the school adopts an all-inclusion-model. 

Morning office hours and a six-week night school offer more chances for students to bridge academic gaps made worse by the pandemic. And teachers are paid to lead and attend professional development sessions. Roughly 80% are Black or brown, serving about 450 students who are predominantly Black, Latino and low-income. 

“When you’re a school of this size, you have the ability to respond and cater to the community that you’re serving, and be more personable with the families that you meet, the people that you work with, and the staff that you hire,” said assistant principal Melissa Poux.

8

They cut through traditional structures to find what works.

Perhaps most significantly, many high school programs are finding new ways to serve at-risk students.

For many, what they need most is more time to grow. At New York City’s Math, Engineering, and Science Academy Charter High School, recent graduates are paid $500 to participate in a six-week “13th grade” Alumni Lab that offers resume writing, interview support and sessions exploring growth mindset, self-awareness and making goals — skills that help young people, particularly alumni of color, work through feelings of inadequacy, shame, or feeling like an imposter. 

“Life has not gone as they were led to believe it would,” said MESA’s co-executive director and co-founder Arthur Samuels. “…You have all of these kids who are not tethered to any institution, but the institution that they are tethered to is their high school. We need to leverage that relationship.” 

The program last spring wrapped up its third cohort, with 71% of participants matriculating back to college or into a free workforce development program.

Schools, Samuels said, “create this artificial bright line that happens on the day of graduation: June 23, you’re our kid. June 24, we give you a diploma and you’re someone else’s problem.” 

At Goodwill Excel Center Adult Charter High School in Washington, D.C., part of a network of Goodwill schools for adult learners nationwide, educators have compressed the traditional 20-week semester into a rolling series of eight-week terms. Coursework is based on competency, not seat time, and four assessments over the course of each term keep students on track.

But those who don’t succeed, even with individualized tutoring, can simply start over again at the end of eight weeks. Students with heavy work or family commitments can stay enrolled by taking just one class per term.

“We like to put high school dropouts into a box and say, ‘This is why they’re a dropout,’” said Excel’s Executive Director, Chelsea Kirk. “But we don’t ever think about what structures caused that. We don’t ever think about ‘How could a school change its structures to embrace people?”

— James Fields, Beth Hawkins, Linda Jacobson, Marianna McMurdock and Jo Napolitano contributed to this report.

]]> /article/innovative-high-schools-nursing/ Wed, 19 Jul 2023 11:15:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=710190 Providence

When she was 6, Jasmine Alvarado was diagnosed with optic nerve glioma, a tumor located on the pathway between the eyes and brain. She spent years enduring painful chemotherapy and blood transfusions, but in the process developed a close relationship with a nurse on the hospital’s chemo floor.

“I could talk to her about anything,” Alvarado said, to the point that “right after they told me good or bad news, I’d always go to her and talk to her about it. She was like my little therapist.”

More than a decade later, Alvarado, now 17, is getting a rare chance to pay back that kindness before she leaves high school. A senior at the Rhode Island Nurses Institute Middle College Charter High School, Alvarado is on her way to a career in oncology nursing, with about half an academic year of college nursing credits under her belt and a certified nursing assistant license due in the mail — all before she graduates.

“Ever since I was little, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do,’ ” she said. 

The school is the brainchild of Pamela McCue, a registered nurse who admits she didn’t even know what a charter school was when she launched one more than a decade ago. She just knew a Baby Boomer-driven nursing shortage loomed on the horizon.

The pandemic, of course, made the anticipated shortage worse.

An by researchers found that nearly 40 years of mostly steady growth in the supply of nurses was “under threat” from COVID burnout, frustration and early retirements. It estimated that the total nursing workforce had dropped by more than 100,000 from 2020 to 2021.

With the U.S. population diversifying, McCue also realized that if the next generation of caregivers was to look like the people they care for, communities would have to grow their own.

“The research is there,” she said. “Patients have better outcomes when they are cared for by nurses who are from their community.”

But when McCue looked at the nursing pipeline, the biggest barrier for students of color entering the field wasn’t their income or family background. It was the poor quality of their high school education. She thought: Let’s start there.

Reality kicks in

Many RINI students arrive having already experienced some of the worst aspects of the U.S. healthcare system.

At 7 years old, Gianna D’Amico, whose family emigrated from Colombia, regularly accompanied her aunt to doctor’s appointments; she served as translator, despite her own thin English vocabulary.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know how to say she had a rupture in something,’” D’Amico said with a little laugh. “I don’t know how to do that. I was like, ‘Oh, it broke. I don’t know!’” 

Sometimes she’d miss school to keep her aunt’s weekday appointments. “But I couldn’t really help her,” said D’Amico, now in her junior year at RINI. “I was only 7.”

When it comes to helping patients, McCue noted that one of the largest factors affecting morbidity and mortality is medication error. If nurses can’t offer care in a patient’s native language, that puts the patient at risk.

Being bilingual is part of what inspired junior Gleny Vargas to pursue a career in neonatal nursing. Born in the Dominican Republic, she emigrated to the United States at age 8 and translated for family members at medical appointments.

“There’s a lot of Spanish-speaking individuals here, and I feel like me being able to speak their language is going to make them more comfortable,” she said.

A culture of care

The school now enrolls 399 students, the maximum its charter will allow. It occupies five stories of a historic brick office building in the heart of downtown Providence, where each morning students from 13 neighboring school districts show up in scrubs. 

It uses its per-pupil allowance for charter schools in innovative ways: RINI has no library — thousands of paperback books sit on shelves scattered in hallways throughout the building — and it doesn’t offer sports or music. Students can pursue those interests at their neighborhood schools, and many do, jumping on city buses after school that take them to soccer games and track meets. The institute offers all students a free bus pass.

The school’s laser-like focus is perhaps its greatest strength, said Principal Tammy Ferland, a veteran educator who came to RINI from Cranston High School West, the state’s largest district.

“This is a health care program, a nursing program,” Ferland said. “If you don’t want to be a nurse, if you don’t want to be in health care, then you don’t belong here.”  

That focus produces a school culture in which students demonstrably support and care for one another. One morning, sophomore E’Niyah Brown recounted how her father had recently died of heart failure and that she now struggles to keep her grades up while running track and holding down a part-time job. Senior Keilany Collazo leaned over and said, “You’re definitely going to make your father proud.”

---

Meet RINI students

Though she’s still reeling from the loss, Brown has her sights on becoming a cardiologist, remembering the reassuring words of her father’s heart doctor both before and after countless operations.

But the intense focus can also be a two-edged sword for students who, at age 14, aren’t ready to commit to a single discipline — or to 180 days of scrubs each year.

“When I first came here, I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t really like it,” said Brown. “I wasn’t going to stay that long. But my mom pushed me to just stay here because I want to be in the medical field.”

Ferland said many students experience something similar to what Brown did: They muddle through their first year or two. Teachers and administrators find themselves in a quiet, near-constant battle with first- and second-year students over wearing forbidden hooded sweatshirts into the building.

But around 11^th grade, “reality kicks in” and they find a sense of purpose and responsibility. “In 11th grade, something just happens and this light bulb goes on with these kiddos,” she said. “It’s amazing to watch the professionalism that comes up.”

As if to demonstrate the shift, one recent morning as she strode the school’s narrow hallways, the principal took aside several students and gently reminded them about the no-hoodie dress code. As one student stripped off his blue sweatshirt over his head, Ferland remarked, sotto voce, “He’s a ninth-grader.”

Collazo, the senior, said the junior-year shift is real. “In 11th grade, I started realizing, ‘Like, I really need to get it together. I’m about to graduate!’ ”   

9 in 10 students are female

RINI also stands out for another reason: It’s overwhelmingly female, at 90.5% of students. Women also dominate its management.

Ferland, the principal, recalled that at Cranston she was the only female administrator on a six-person team. At RINI, women hold six of the seven top management slots. “For me, this is a total shift,” she said.

The school’s student body is also predominantly students of color: 66.5% are Hispanic and 24% are Black. And nearly one in four speaks a foreign language.

The school’s demographics, in a way, reflect trends in Rhode Island: In the most recent U.S. Census in 2020, Hispanic and Latino residents comprised 16.6% of the population, up nearly 40% from a decade earlier. That puts the state overall in Hispanic population, four percentage points higher than neighboring Massachusetts.

Opened in 2011, RINI was long considered “the best-kept secret in Rhode Island,” said Ferland. Of its 384 graduates, nearly three-fourths remain in the collegiate pipeline. But once word got out about its unique curriculum, the school’s waiting list lengthened.

RINI holds the distinction of being the top high school in the state for students earning college credits. While several seniors like Alvarado are due to graduate with 18 credits, Nursing Director Jenny Santana said a few have already earned that many as juniors. “Many adults in college, as we speak, are taking classes over and over again just to get into the nursing program in their field,” she said. 

By the time they graduate, Santana said, many of them are already working in the healthcare field, at least part time, often with certified nursing assistant, or CNA, licenses. Because the school partners with local health care organizations, students routinely graduate with 40 hours of clinical rotations and a 40-hour internship already on their resumes.

Santana, herself a first-generation college graduate from a single-parent family, took 10 years to complete her nursing education, so she knows the barriers many of her students face. Their parents come to the U.S. with high hopes. “They put them in good schools, but they need more help.”

The exposure to the nuts and bolts of nursing is driving demand, Ferland said. She noted that while just 36 students graduated in June, next year the number will more than double. Soon, graduating classes of more than 100 will be typical. 

In the fall, RINI clones will begin popping up elsewhere. The first one is due to open in , with plans for others in coming years. McCue is in discussions with as many as five states over expansion plans, Ferland said. 

‘They know they’re going to have a good experience’

Jajacob Santiago, a junior, dreams of being a pediatrician — he’ll probably start his career as a physician’s assistant. At 17, he has already earned his temporary CNA license, which entitles him to work part-time at a nursing home. Earning about $20 per hour, his salary rivals that of many adults doing hourly work. With a permanent license and a few more exams in hand, he expects to be able to earn $25 to $30 per hour as he finishes high school and works his way through college.

“When you work in a nursing home,” he said, “not many of the residents get visitors … they don’t get phone calls. So you’re the only person they talk to basically the whole day, except for when they need the nurse for two minutes.”

As a CNA, he bathes patients, but also gets to know them. “There’s even moments when I’m working that I’ll just go on my break, I’ll go sit in the residents room and just talk to them for a few minutes. I’ll make them laugh and have them tell me about their stories. And that just makes their day when they see you walk into work very happy — because they know they’re going to have a good experience.”

The work is hard and the days are long — Santiago said his workday often doesn’t end til 10 or 11 p.m.

For now, he’s helping his parents pay bills and putting a little bit away in savings. He wants to buy a car someday soon, so his mother doesn’t have to drive him around.

“Being with people and knowing that I’m taking care of somebody and doing what I want to do in life. This is just the start.”

]]> /article/louisiana-state-university-expands-programs-to-stem-nursing-shortage/ Wed, 10 Aug 2022 14:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=694478 This article was originally published in

LSU Health Sciences New Orleans is expanding three accelerated nursing programs to north Louisiana with the hope of mitigating the state’s nursing shortage.

Like many states, Louisiana has experienced an acute shortage of nurses heightened by the . There are currently about in the state.

In June, Shreveport officials warned the shortage would and fewer nurses available to care for admitted patients.

---

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

---

“We are pleased to lead an LSU system-wide effort to quickly fill an urgent need for highly qualified nurses in North Louisiana,” said Steve Nelson, interim chancellor at LSU Health New Orleans. “Working with LSU Health Shreveport and LSU Shreveport, our accelerated nursing degree programs will address this critical situation.”

Two programs will offer an accelerated path to a bachelor’s degree in nursing, including a two-year program for students who have a bachelor’s degree in another field and a one-year program for students with an associate’s degree or diploma in nursing.

LSU will also offer a one-year master’s degree with a nurse educator concentration. The program is intended for students with a bachelor’s in nursing.

While the courses will be offered at LSU Health Sciences Shreveport, some courses will be taught remotely from New Orleans. Degrees will be issued by LSU Health Sciences New Orleans.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jarvis DeBerry for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on and .

]]> /article/the-us-doesnt-have-enough-faculty-to-train-the-next-generation-of-nurses/ Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=583425 Despite a national , over in 2020, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

This was to a shortage of nursing professors and a limited number of clinical placements where nursing students get practical job training. include a shortage of experienced practitioners to provide supervision during clinical training, insufficient classroom space and inadequate financial resources.

---

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

---

Although the 80,000 for students who apply to multiple nursing schools, it clearly suggests that not all qualified students are able to enroll in nursing school.

I am a nurse researcher, and founding director of , an office at the University of South Florida that focuses on the well-being of the health care workforce. I’ve found that the nursing shortage is a complex issue that – but chief among them is the shortage of faculty to train future nurses.

Growing demand for nurses

There are not enough new nurses entering the U.S. health care system each year to meet the country’s . This can have serious consequences for and .

Nationally, the number of jobs for registered nurses is .

Some states project an even higher demand for registered nurses because of their population and their needs. Florida, for example, will need to over the next decade.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there will be about for registered nurses each year over the next decade to meet the demands of the growing population, and also to replace nurses who retire or quit the profession. This means the U.S. will need about by 2030.

In addition to a shortage of registered nurses, there is also a shortage of nurse practitioners. Nurse practitioner is identified as the in the next decade, after wind turbine technicians, with a projected increase of 52.2%. Nurse practitioners have an advanced scope of practice compared with registered nurses. They must complete additional clinical hours, earn a master’s or doctoral degree in nursing, and complete additional certifications to work with specific patient populations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the . Despite these problems, student enrollment in nursing schools . The pandemic has not turned people away from wanting to pursue a career in nursing. However, without enough nursing faculty and clinical sites, there will not be enough new nurses to meet the health care demands of the nation.

Need for more nursing faculty

Currently, the national . This is slightly improved from the . More than half of all nursing schools . The highest need is in nursing programs in .

Nursing education in clinical settings requires smaller student-to-faculty ratios than many other professions in order to maintain the safety of patients, students and faculty members. Regulatory agencies recommend at least one faculty member to engaged in clinical learning.

The faculty shortage is also affected by the fact that many current nursing faculty members are . The percentage of full-time nursing faculty members increased from roughly 18% in 2006 to nearly 31% in 2015.

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reports the of doctorally prepared nurse faculty members at the ranks of professor, associate professor and assistant professor were 62.6, 56.9 and 50.9 years, respectively.

Another factor that contributes to the nursing faculty shortage, and the most critical issue , is compensation. The salary of a nurse with an advanced degree is much higher in clinical and private sectors than it is in academia.

According to a survey by the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, the , across settings and specialties, is $110,000. By contrast, the AACN reported in March 2020 that the in nursing schools was just under $80,000.

Fixing the faculty shortage

Innovative strategies are needed to address the nursing faculty shortage. The was a start. The act provides funding for nursing faculty development, scholarships and loan repayment for nurses, and grants for advanced nursing education, nursing diversity initiatives and other priorities.

The Build Back Better Act that in November 2021 includes funding to help nursing schools across the country recruit and retain diverse nursing faculty and enroll and retain nursing students. The act is now before the U.S. Senate.

In addition to national strategies, individual states are addressing the shortage at the local level. Maryland, for example, awarded over to 14 higher education institutions with nursing programs in Maryland to expand and increase the number of qualified nurses.

Finally, offering faculty salaries comparable to those in clinical settings may attract more nurses to use their expertise to train and expand the next generation of health care workers.

Dr. Rayna M. Letourneau is an assistant professor at the University of South Florida College of Nursing.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

]]>