Chris Kalbfleisch
When schools open their doors in times of crisis, they act as a critical public service.
“Our school is currently seen as the helpless stepchild of the district,” says Debbie Luevano in a phone conversation about University High School (UHS) in Roswell, New Mexico, where she serves as community school coordinator.
UHS is indeed the lowest of the low in the Roswell Independent Schools District (RISD) in terms of performance measures such as scores on standardized tests, attendance, and graduation rates.
According to state measurements of school performance, UHS has the lowest math and reading proficiencies in the district. It is also the only school in RISD that has been designated as a More Rigorous Intervention School, a label used by the state for schools that are either in the lowest 5 percent of Title I schools, that have an average four-year graduation rate of less than or equal to 66.67 percent over the past three years, or that have already received extensive state support but failed to make progress.
UHS’s score on the state rating system is thirty-four out of 100, compared to two other RISD high schools, Goddard High and Roswell High, which have scores of fifty-nine and fifty, respectively.
“The school has a bad reputation,” says Kristen Salyards, the RISD community schools coordinator, noting that UHS has long been considered an “alternative school,” where pregnant students or students with discipline problems or in danger of dropping out attend. “But we’re going to change that.”
“I want our school to be seen in a different light,” Luevano adds. “I want it to be known as a school where students will graduate and get good jobs.”
Is UHS a school that can be turned around?
In education policy circles, the term “school turnaround” has become the stuff of legends, that there’s somehow a readymade strategy that schools can use to undo a label of “low performance” based on statistical data such as student test scores and graduation rates.
The most ambitious school turnaround effort ever was undertaken during the presidential administration of Barack Obama, when his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in 2010, rolled out Race to the Top. The program, as Education Week reported when Duncan unveiled it, was to devote billions in federal spending to “‘turn around’ the nation’s 5,000 worst-performing schools.”
Seven years and $7 billion later, the Department of Education admitted that the turnaround effort generally “failed to produce meaningful results,” according to a 2017 report in The Washington Post.
Can a tiny, mostly rural school district in New Mexico, the state with the fourth highest poverty rate in the nation, expect to do any better? Especially at a school such as UHS, where virtually all of the students qualify for federally subsidized meals—a common designation for poverty—and many hold down full-time jobs?
Roswell educators think they can, pointing to some early positive trends at UHS.
According to Salyards, only sixteen of the 116 students at UHS graduated in 2021. By 2023, that ratio improved to 102 graduates out of 117 students.
Another metric that has improved, Salyards says, is the incidents of substance abuse in school. In the 2022-2023 school year, UHS counted twenty infractions; so far this year, there have been only four.
UHS has also had chronic problems with absenteeism and suspensions. But in the 2023-2024 school year, daily attendance levels improved from 12 percent to 50 percent, and suspensions, which were often due to fighting, have also dramatically declined.
Student fights had become commonplace at UHS, Luevano explains, with roughly ten-to-fifteen occurring per semester. This school year, there has been only one, which occurred in February.
Salyards and Luevano believe these positive outcomes have been the result of a change in philosophy about how to operate schools—a change that came about after RISD adopted what’s commonly called the community schools approach.
According to the New Mexico Public Education Department’s website, “Community schools are a whole child, comprehensive strategy to transform schools into places where educators, local community members, families, and students work together to strengthen conditions for student learning and healthy development.”
RISD was in the first wave of districts in the state to adopt the approach, initially in just one school, Sierra Middle School, the Roswell Daily Record reports. UHS started its implementation of the strategy in 2022.
According to a Community Schools Playbook by the Partnership for the Future of Learning, schools adopting the community schools approach implement programs and policies that address the “local needs, assets, and priorities” of the community rather than impose plans from the top down. For that reason, the adoption of the community schools approach may look different from school to school, but the process entailed in the approach never changes.
Essential to that process is for schools to ascertain the needs and interests of students and families and assess what supports are available at the school and in the surrounding community.
Based on this information, schools can then formulate strategies to address what students and families need, usually with local partners in the community.
“We knew our school has had chronic problems with absenteeism and suspensions,” Luevano says. “When we did a causal analysis, we discovered there were a lot of students experiencing food insecurity, lack of housing, and substance abuse—real basic needs. So we decided we had to start there because if students don’t have basic things like food, transportation, good mental health, and housing, schoolwork is the last thing on their mind.”
To help facilitate student and family services, UHS opened a resource center in the school during school hours to help families address basic problems like how to get access to housing and health services.
Luevano and her colleagues also offered two afterschool groups—a boys’ leadership group and a girls’ circle—to provide forums for students to share their home life issues and collaborate on solving basic needs problems. Students obtained extra credit for participating in the afterschool groups.
To address problems with food insecurity, the school started a partnership with a local charity to distribute food on campus. “The first time we did a food distribution, no students came,” Luevano says, “but dozens of families now show up, and students enjoy pitching in to help distribute the food.”
“The way to address food insecurity is to take away the shame,” Salyards notes. “It requires helping students to voice their problems without feeling embarrassment. You have to make it cool to come to school pantries and food distributions.”
Another step UHS took to address chronic absenteeism was to rearrange the school’s daily schedule to be better aligned with student interests and family needs.
UHS staff noticed that the more popular courses were new career pathway classes, which had been started in 2022 as a districtwide endeavor to better align high school curriculum to work opportunities outside school. “Students love the career pathway classes because many of them already hold jobs,” Luevano says, “and they get direct benefit from the course material in their work.”
Drawing from this realization, UHS staff came up with the idea to hold the career pathways classes first thing in the morning, so that students coming to school mainly for those classes would be more likely to attend their core academic classes later in the day. “Once the students are on campus, they’re more apt to stay,” says Luevano.
On the issue of substance abuse, Salyards and her colleagues examined incident data and realized that most of the students getting caught for substance abuse were sixth graders, so efforts needed to be focused on the middle school grades. Efforts to educate parents about the problems ramped up districtwide.
“We brought in expertise from the outside to educate parents and students about the issues,” Salyards explains. “We had to educate parents about what to look for—that the device your kids have that looks like a portable USB drive is really a vape and what might look like Skittles are really drugs.”
“We had to partner with community organizations to come into the school every week to teach life skills like self-organizing and goal setting, and how those skills are undermined by substance abuse,” she says. “We created school curricula on the harms that substance abuse does to physical and mental health. This was particularly effective with kids involved in athletics.
For kids willing to admit addiction, we partnered with an agency in town that knows how to talk to young people about addiction.”
To address discipline issues and suspensions, Luevano and her colleagues again looked for root causes of misbehavior and fighting rather than just emphasizing rule enforcement and punishments.
What they found was that there was a lot of need for mental health treatment, so the school brought counselors into the school and started using restorative justice approaches to misbehavior. “We give students more time and space to work things out,” says Luevano.
Although it’s not clear whether the improvements achieved at UHS have done anything to raise students’ scores on standardized tests, Salyards and Luevano believe higher scores will eventually come about.
If they’re right, then Salyards offers two lessons learned based on her experience with the approach.
First, although the community schools process must be replicated with fidelity to the original idea, the results will necessarily differ. “The biggest mistake is to believe that you can take something that worked in one school—like starting a food pantry, for instance, or a particular kind of after school group—and believe it will work in another,” she says. For that reason, the community schools approach doesn’t adhere to the notion, popular in business and industry, that successful school improvement approaches need to result in ideas that scale from one school to implementation systemwide.
Her second important lesson learned is that schools need to meet students and families where they are, not where school leaders expect them to be. This requires extensive outreach efforts throughout the year and in every corner of the community.
But if the community schools approach can repair the reputation of a struggling campus like UHS, can it also rehabilitate the reputation of the school turnaround idea?
A 2019 analysis of school turnaround efforts by the Rockefeller Institute of Government points to some evidence that highly customized, school-by-school improvement efforts like the community schools approach are more effective than previous turnaround ideas adopted from the business world.
According to that analysis, “While turnarounds have not worked as a transformative public education reform policy on a sweeping scale, they have worked in select individual instances. The lessons learned from past turnaround efforts do not call for a wholesale all-or-nothing response, just the right approach that includes several critical design features. While turnarounds may not be a scalable strategy on a nationwide, statewide, or citywide level, the turnaround of failing schools on an individual, school-by-school basis—when done right—can succeed.”
Another analysis, written by Matt Barnum for The 74 in 2017, reviewed Obama’s failed turnaround effort and cautioned against writing off the school turnaround idea.
“Another alternative is the creation of community schools,” Barnum wrote, “which attempt to address out-of-school factors, like poverty or health, that could negatively affect learning.”
For evidence that the community schools approach can be a strategy for successful school turnarounds, Barnum pointed to New York City, where former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s community schools approach rolled out in 267 schools in 2014.
There were a number of positive results of that effort, according to a RAND analysis in 2020, including improvements in attendance and graduation rates, reductions in disciplinary incidents, a small positive impact on math achievement, and positive effects on school culture.
Back at UHS, Luevano believes the community schools approach can transform the school’s “hopeless stepchild” status to a family favorite. “I tell people that the community schools idea is not just to focus on the academic needs of students but to address all the needs of students and families,” Luevano says. “My hope is to keep seeing growth and sustainability from everything we’re putting into place.”