The teachers, administrators and especially the students at the Manual High Education Complex were pioneers, said Nancy Sutton, the principal who spearheaded its transformation to three small schools in 2001.
Back then, the idea generated real excitement in a community where student achievement levels were abysmal. With the help of Manual alumni, city leaders and neighborhood activists, Sutton persuaded the Gates Family Foundation – and a reluctant Denver school board – to support the challenging project.
Nobody said it would be easy, and it wasn’t, she said. “Anybody who stuck with Manual was a hero.”
So what went wrong?
A lot.
The principals were inexperienced, and district administrators provided little help when problems arose.
The larger community never embraced – or even understood – the concept, so Manual remained an anomaly in an environment where large high schools were the norm.
And the teachers, who were working long hours trying to create and implement programs simultaneously, simply burned out.
Van Schoales, interim president of the Colorado Children’s Campaign, called the district’s approach to Manual “agnostic.” The problems at Manual are not an indictment of small schools. “They’re very much an indictment of bad implementation – no matter what you’re trying to do.”
The schools were rushed into operation without a detailed design for curricula and teaching styles, he said. It took a year for one of the schools to get access to the Internet, which was just one example of the logistical problems Manual teachers had to overcome.
There was no time to develop critical parent involvement and community support, so many students dropped out or transferred to schools with traditional schedules, familiar routines, winning teams – and Internet access.
Denver Public Schools administrators, meanwhile, looked the other way.
At a school board meeting two years ago, Schoales said, the only questions directed to the team from Manual were about the choir, the jazz band and the sports teams. No one asked about student achievement.
About that time, Sutton attended a conference in Ohio and listened to members of the Manual team talking about the lack of money and support for their school.
“They were so pessimistic,” she said. “I started to cry. I knew then it was not going to make it.”
Still, Sutton and Schoales both believe passionately in the small-schools concept.
“It got a bad rap here,” said Schoales.
Successful small-school projects are operating in Washington state, California, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York.
As director of the statewide leadership initiative of the Center for Excellence in Leadership of Learning at the University of Indianapolis, Sutton works with about 20 of them across the country.
“It’s not one-size-fits-all,” she said, and in high-impact areas, like at Manual, where student achievement is a serious problem, “anything less than a total commitment by the district and the community” spells doom.
The district “allowed Manual to languish,” said Sutton. That kind of not-so- benign neglect would never occur in a school in a high-income community. Problems would have been addressed as they arose. But at Manual, Sutton said, “they let it go down, down, down.”
It was tough to watch. “I still relive Manual all the time in my head,” she said.
But Sutton has no regrets about trying to turn things around at Manual.
“Is it any worse than it was” in 2000? she said. Probably not. “Is it enough better? Absolutely not.”
So it’s time to shut the Manual small- schools project down, and it’s past time to learn from the mistakes.
If the next reincarnation of Manual is to succeed, it’s going to need everybody’s support.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
