Don’t fit in school? There’s a different WAY

Jessica Cooper was so turned off by all the drugs and the social drama at her Livingston County high school that she finally dropped out during her junior year.

“You had to be popular, or in a specific group,” she explained. “It just made me want to be alone.”

Soon after she enrolled in the area’s alternative high school, she learned about yet another option: The WAY (Widening Advancements for Youth) Program would let her set her own schedule and work mostly from a computer at home.

Cooper, 19, amazed even herself by how quickly she progressed. On Aug. 1, she received her high school diploma.

“I recommend WAY to everybody,” said the Pinckney resident. “If you don’t like high school -- if you can’t do high school -- try to get in.”

Located at 10 sites serving about 1,300 students from more than 100 school districts throughout the state, the WAY Program lets students work both at learning labs and online from home computers, with personalized support from a team of educators.

According to WAY Regional Executive Bethany Rayl, the typical WAY student has been disengaged from the traditional high school for any number of reasons. Some have health concerns, or jobs that preclude attending a traditional day school. Some have at-risk factors, and have gotten behind in school because of attendance issues.

And some are gifted and talented and feel the traditional school doesn’t fit them anymore.

Rayl said a big advantage of the online component is that it “shatters the walls of time and space.”

“I’ve been in public education for about 24 years now, and, as a classroom teacher, you get into a situation where you’re just getting into a great activity with young people and the time’s up,” she said. “In the WAY Program, a young person can deeply engage in a project and see it through to completion.”

WAY is entirely project-based, and standards-focused, so the students -- who are called “researchers” -- co-design projects with content area experts based on their interests. Each student is paired with a mentor, team leaders and content experts.

Team leader Chris Dotson likes the fact that WAY works with students who otherwise have found no success in school.

“The difference is that in a traditional school, the student is basically being told what they should do and the teacher is leading the class,” said Dotson. “That has a lot of benefits to it. In this program, though, the student -- or researcher -- is actually the one in charge of how they’re learning. And we’re the ones guiding them along. So they have a lot more say in how they learn it, so it’s much more applicable to their lives.”

When high school dropouts are asked why they didn’t like school, the common answer is: “It doesn’t relate to my life; there’s no point to it, or benefit from it,” Dotson said.

“WAY creates relevance through the projects that relate to their lives while learning about such things as public policy, math, science, English, and social studies.”

One student’s recent project, for instance, was texting while driving, which taught public policy, law, technology and media and language arts skills.

Every WAY student is graded according to standards set by the Michigan Merit Curriculum, so they’re learning the same material they would in the traditional school, but in a different way.

WAY reports a retention rate of 93 percent. Upon completion of the standards-based curriculum, students receive a high school diploma, not a G.E.D.

WAY started as a pilot program in 2008 after two Michigan educators, Glen Taylor and Beth Baker, modeled it after England’s successful Notschool program.

In 2009, Taylor and Baker formed the nonprofit WAY, and it has grown from there. Local and intermediate school districts pay WAY a fee for service, per student, per year. WAY operates  year-round and programs are located in Livingston, Muskegon, Oakland and Washtenaw counties and communities stretching from Watervliet and Niles in the southwest to Hale in the northeast.

Baker said that encouraging aspirations is only the first half of a crucial equation that includes empowering and equipping students with the skills and knowledge to achieve them. Through a variety of individualized learning programs, she said, WAY students realize it’s not how they choose to progress that matters, but the progression itself.

“We are not here to curb anyone’s aim,” she said. “We’re here to cultivate it. Imagination is an incredibly powerful thing, but actualization can be even more powerful.”

Jessica Cooper would agree.

“It was cool to have people actually help me along the way, and it was nice to be able to work at my own pace,” Cooper said. “I feel I accomplished something for myself for once.”

Jo Collins Mathis is a veteran journalist who has written for numerous publications in Washtenaw and Wayne counties. She was an award-winning reporter and columnist with the Ann Arbor News for 15 years, and a features page editor and columnist at the Ypsilanti Press.