Tackling dropout rate with team ties

For the students, a new program makes freshman year at Franklin High School feel oddly like middle school, with more individual attention and a lesser chance they will need to brave the school's senior-swarmed Main Hall.

The shift is meant to ease their transition to high school, and while freshmen said it does accomplish that goal, most interviewed said they are almost envious of the sensation of getting lost on the first day that their older siblings experienced.

Under the school's new freshmen collaborative, first-year students at Franklin High are grouped into four teams, each with just over 100 students, who take all of their core classes together, with teachers based on a single hallway teaching only to that team. Even upperclassmen tutors are assigned to a specific team. For art, music, gym, and other electives, freshmen still mix with upperclassmen in the 1,600-student school.

The teachers on each team meet once a week, and because they share the same students, they can better identify students who struggle in more than one class.

"I've had more conversations with more parents in the past five weeks than I had over the course of last year," said Kris Neal, a special education teacher. "We're contacting the parents with details we didn't know before."

Johnna MacLean, who teaches history, said she has noticed fewer students failing this year than in the past.

And English teacher John Koch said he has seen a spike in extracurricular in volvement: 15 students are attending his book club, he pointed out, compared with three last year.

In part, the freshmen collaborative is meant to combat the unusually high dropout rate Franklin High faced for two consecutive school years. In 2003-2004, 0.4 percent of students dropped out, but in 2004-2005, the number rose to 1.3 percent, and in 2005-2006, the most recent year with data available, the number fell only slightly, to 1.1 percent.

The teams allow teachers to reach and support students who might get lost in a bigger crowd, according to the school's principal, Pam Gould. She said Franklin High is lucky that the school district could afford to hire a consultant and have a special education teacher for each team.

"For years, you educated children in that factory model," she said. "As we continue to educate them in the same way, we're losing kids. They drop out," or they drift away emotionally, she said.

While the teachers seem unabashedly positive about the new approach, a group of freshmen, all officers in the class of 2011, offered mixed reviews.

They said they like the convenience, but not the isolation, of having all their classes in the same part of the building.

"It kind of feels like your fourth year of middle school," said Peter Waite, the class treasurer. But he also identified some perks. He's able to avoid Main Hall, for example, and his math teacher incorporates vocabulary words from English class into lessons.

"It's a good and bad thing," said Kasey Bressler, the class secretary.

Students are glad they do not have to plan the day around trips to their lockers. But they miss seeing their friends from other teams in the halls. And some were worried the new system would only delay the inevitable shock of attending high school the "real" way.

"Next year, you'll have to do this all over again," said Andrea Bates, vice president of her class.

Gould and Peter Light, the school's assistant principal, said they are waiting to see first-semester grades before they give too much thought to whether sophomores should also be grouped in teams. The two will also conduct a survey of students and parents.

Most of the students oppose team-teaching for sophomores.

"I don't want to be babied throughout high school," said Jay Borrelli, the class president.

"I want a high school experience," added Bates.

"But I don't want to walk through a brick wall of seniors," said Carlen Smoske, a representative for one of the teams.

The eight class officers rated the freshmen collaborative system as a 6 or 7, on a scale of 1 to 10.

"If you ask the teachers, they'd all say 9 or 10," said Gould.