Context
Washington Metropolitan Opportunity Academy (Wash Met) is one of four alternative high schools in the District of Columbia Public School System. We serve students in grades 8-12 who have not found academic, social-emotional or personal success at any of the other comprehensive high schools in the city. Wash Met has an enrollment of approximately two hundred students, at least half of whom are enrolled in my English class and will experience this instructional unit. The biggest impediment to successful implementation of this unit lies in the fact that my students are almost all part of a statistically at-risk group that must contend with issues around truancy, transiency, adjudication and learning gaps. Chronic truancy plagues our students and makes it difficult for teachers to consistently provide rigorous and rich instruction. Adding to our dismal attendance rate is the rolling admissions policy that our school has instituted allowing students to bounce around from one school to the next without ever having completed any courses and thereby failing the course which they end up repeating, all of which adds a layer of stress to our enrollment and class size and does nothing to curb the growth of over aged and under credited students in our building. Further complicating the business of teaching and learning in our school is that so many of our students are adjudicated and at any given moment can transfer facilities, evade authorities, get released or locked up an indefinite time. All these points of contention make it difficult to maintain any academic and/or social-emotional continuity with our students, which only serves to widen their learning gaps and the overall achievement gap between students in America’s classrooms. To mitigate these issues and foster a more educationally responsive learning environment and school community, heading into the new school year our team plans to implement a strategic truancy abatement plan, provide online resources that allow students to access classroom content and forge a consortium partnership with the other opportunity academies to moderate the transiency issues. The adjudication issues at present have no pat answers as they are largely out of our hands. We are hopeful however that the family engagement campaign that our school is launching will help to strengthen our home-school connection and refocus our students’ attention from matters of the street to matters of a successful future.
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