JOHNSON: 'New' Manual High School is taking 'new' seriously

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Thursday, May 15, 2008

It looked like any other high school around town, except for the small groups of kids you see at most schools, slouching a few hundred yards up the street, smoking cigarettes, ditching third period.

I circled Manual High School on the city's northeast side twice in an attempt to find those kids, and came up empty both times.

This, after all, is the once-failed and shuttered low-performer school where mostly working-class and poor black and Hispanic parents sent their kids.

Today, a school year has almost passed since Denver Public Schools, in a grand and much-publicized experiment, reopened the "new" Manual High School. Enrollment was limited to freshmen. New administrators were brought in, who hired a fresh set of teachers, instituted a dress code and promised an innovative, charter school-like curriculum.

It was a little after 11 a.m. on Tuesday, and the walkways and seating areas outside of the high school were deserted.

So, too, were the long hallways inside the school. It turned out that they were all in, of all places, class.

Rob Stein greeted me warmly. I had not seen him since those nervous first weeks when I kept reminding him that Manual was hardly the posh, suburban Graland Country Day School he'd run before taking on this challenge.

How has the year gone? I asked before we took up chairs in his office. Rob Stein, 48, leaned back, folded his hands in his lap and broke into a large grin.

"By most reasonable measures," he finally said, "I would say this was a good first year."

School success is judged by numbers. Rob Stein began ticking some off.

At the end of the third quarter, Manual had an 89 percent attendance rate, 10 percent better than the DPS average, he said.

Ninety percent of students are on track with course credits to move on to 10th grade, an extremely positive number, he said, given that ninth grade is a gateway predictor of the graduation rate.

"Still," Rob Stein said, "talk to me in August."

That is when results of CSAP testing are expected to be released, a moment in time most school principals pace and fret over.

"What I know," he said, "is we have definitely done better than the odds might have predicted."

He started the year with 168 students. On Thursday, 150 were still enrolled. Student retention, as it is with every low-income school, has been a challenge.

"One student," Rob Stein said softly, "is still unaccounted for. She is a runaway. No one - the school, the police or her family - knows where she is."

Six were put in what he called "alternate placements." They were pregnant teens or students who were expelled or headed that way.

Others moved away or picked a different charter closer to where they lived. The rest, he said, "were kids I call unhappy customers, who decided this was just not right for them."

The "new" Manual at times was a challenge for both the faculty and the student body, Rob Stein said.

"The first few weeks, I'd call them really intense," he said.

There were shoving incidents, teens coming to the school from different neighborhoods "trying to establish (gang) turf," Rob Stein said.

"We've tried hard to keep that out, to create an environment at the school as a neutral zone."

There were initial problems in the classrooms.

"A teacher in those first weeks would say something as simple as 'Let's take out our books.' It was a behavior some students didn't fully understand. They would look sullen or, in some cases, become defiant."

Lizzie Krueger, 28, who teaches earth sciences, believes things began to change after the Christmas break.

"They hadn't bought in yet to what we were about, what the school is about," she explained. "I think they were happy to come back to this community after that long break. Now, it's their school, and they seem to be really trying hard to make it work."

Like all faculty and administrators, she has 12 students she mentors, keeps each of their cell phone numbers in her phone and does not hesitate to go find them if they fail to go to class.

"I came here from a high school in suburban Milwaukee last year, and I just love it. I love the work, the commitment. I want to be here. Not one of us wants to run away from this."

Every one of his teachers, Rob Stein said, has signed up for next year.

He prints out for me a sheet showing the academic status of students at Manual, comparing students with at least one "F" to those on the honor roll.

In the first quarter, those with F more than doubled those on the honor roll. The F number has steadily fallen since, reaching near-equilibrium by the end of the third quarter.

"This project has been invigorating," Rob Stein said. "It's the kids.

"But the level of uncertainty in this business does get taxing. Education is an uncertain craft. It breeds doubt. In the end, though, I've found it usually works out."

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763.