Seeking Validation at Pueblo’s Central High School
Accreditation from outside agency AdvancED gives Pueblo City Schools a sense of validation amid turnaround efforts.
Central High School seniors Angela Nelson and Kaleb Mora have spent much of the past semester building models of the human body and writing code for handmade elevators.
As part of the curriculum for their electives classes, the students have learned to build projects like these in the science, technology, engineering and math field.
The classes, the students said, are intensive but they’re also part of the reason they like studying STEM. For Nelson, it comes down to her human body systems class and for Mora, it’s principles of engineering.
Classes like these are also perhaps part of the reason Central received STEM certification from AdvancED, a nonprofit, nonpartisan accreditation agency and maybe even why Pueblo City Schools received overall accreditation from the agency.
As the school and district battle a low accreditation rating from the Colorado Department of Education, AdvancED provided a sense of validation for the work the school district has put into turning things around over the past few years.
The accreditation District 60 received from AdvancED is independent from the process it will undergo with the state, but if anything, it helps supplement that process, even if the state accreditation doesn’t go as planned for the district.
“It’s just about validating the work that our staff has done over the past couple years to move toward a STEM school,” said Lynn Seifert, principal of Central High School.
Nelson and Mora said the classes benefit them, too.
“It’s cool because the work we do in there, it doesn’t feel like schoolwork,” Mora said. “It feels like we build stuff, like adult Legos.”
In just a few months, Nelson and Mora will head to Colorado State University in Fort Collins to study, respectively, biochemistry and civil engineering. They’re already passionate about their majors, and both have received college credit. Nelson learned recently that she got a one-year scholarship.
But before attending Central, the students said, they never considered taking up majors in the STEM field.
“For me, I was always interested in science,” Nelson said. “It’s just coming here and having more access to it that made me want to pursue it.”
“I always liked it because my parents were in that field but I kind of decided that’s what I wanted to do when I was able to have access to all the courses, the one-on-one, hands-on work,” she said. “I definitely set my mind on it.”
But what might have happened if the students were just three years older?
Over the course of the past three years, Central High School has shifted much of its curriculum to focus on STEM subjects. The school offers electives, like the ones Nelson and Mora are taking, that emphasize a hands-on approach to the subjects, and more traditional courses, such as English, have also integrated its practices into class.
To accomplish this sense of schoolwide STEM integration, Central became involved with Project Lead the Way, a nonprofit organization emphasizing STEM curriculum, and Project Based Learning, which is offered through the Buck Institute for Education, an organization that helps to train teachers in specialized areas.
The school also sent two teachers, Drew Hirshon and Morgan Kempf, to a Buck World teaching conference, where they learned how to further train other teachers in STEM. As Central’s STEM teacher on special assignment, Hirshon helps teachers on a daily basis to integrate the practices into class.
And in terms of teamwork Hirshon said, “the school has a great culture,” adding that much of his role involves working with every teacher in the school.
Some of the integration can be difficult, English teacher Rachel Canchola said, especially for subjects that aren’t related to STEM.
“It was a challenge to incorporate the science,” she said, but the emphasis on collaboration could make things easier.
As much work as the school put into STEM curriculum, Central still wasn’t sure it could officially call itself a STEM school.
“I mean, it’s just the buzzword,” Seifert said. “And so I thought well, ‘Are you STEM? Are we STEM?’ And so that was a question mark for me.”
As Pueblo City Schools prepared for overall accreditation from AdvancED, Seifert noticed that the agency also offered STEM certification, a relatively new service. After preparing the staff, Seifert led the school toward applying.
Seifert said she helped other school districts in the past receive accreditation, so she knew how to prepare.
In March, the district officially learned it would receive overall accreditation and that the school would receive STEM certification.
But for Central and Pueblo City Schools, there’s still room for improvement, especially as the district looks toward getting accreditation from the state.
As part of the process of applying for accreditation, the school first conducted a self-evaluation and then received an external review, in which the agency interviewed close to 300 people, including students, parents and community members.
In a special school board meeting in March, the agency pointed out that the district needed to become more unified.
“You’re at a time when you need to become a school system,” said George Griffin, AdvancED’s lead evaluator for the project, adding that the district had “no unifying theme that permeated throughout.”
“There are disparities among the schools,” he said.
These disparities, he said, could ultimately translate to confusion among students in the scenario that they had to change schools in the middle of the school year. Without a unifying theme, each school in the district is on a different page.
And as a school that falls into the priority improvement category, the third in the CDE’s four-tier accreditation system, Central may also have work to do.
Since 2010, when the CDE first had the authority to accredit schools, Central has either been on a priority improvement plan or under improvement or priority improvement status. This ultimately means that in the eyes of the state, the school has seen minimal, if fluctuating, improvement.
But as the school works through these hurdles, its emphasis has been placed on innovation and creating an inclusive atmosphere, especially for underrepresented groups. Seventy-four percent of Central’s student population qualifies for free and reduced lunch, according to the CDE, and 77 percent of its student population includes Hispanic or Latino students.
When it comes to the STEM field, Seifert said Central is well above the national average. Half of the student population, she said, also includes female students, a group that is still making strides in the field.
“We have 50 percent females in our STEM program and because of our population, they’re Latino,” Seifert said. “And so we’re well above the national average, but we couldn’t really say that we did it with a lot of intention. It’s just the way we see things.”
As Nelson and Mora look toward graduation, they said their experiences with Central’s STEM program have led them to their future plans.
“I think that will take me further in life and I can apply it to the environmental aspects and all these different things,” Nelson said of her biochemistry major.
“I was like alright I kind of want to go down this path,” Mora said. “I really liked the civil engineering. So, next year, I’ll be attending CSU, as well, and I’ll be doing civil engineering.”
