Here’s a School Improvement Team with guts.

This year the Mt. Hope High School’s School Improvement Team (SIT) decided its main goal for the year was to tackle the dropout rate, currently at 17 percent, higher than the state’s average of 15 percent. Targeting dropouts is not unheard of. But these folks invited one of their own dropouts to come back and address the meeting as to why she thought Mt. Hope was a waste of her time.

Jamie Crowley, the school’s dynamic vice principal in charge of guidance and the SIT, explained to the group that Bethany had come to him last fall, fed up and ready to walk. He couldn’t talk her out of it, but couldn’t let her leave school either. “She’s college material,” he noted with chagrin. In time, he secured her a seat at the Metropolitan Career and Technical School, also known as the Met.

The Met is in Providence, by the way, a considerable schlepp from Bristol/Warren. But it has been the right fit for Bethany, so she’s on track to graduate.

Dressed in a mildly alternative fashion, with a short plaid skirt and a simple lip stud, Bethany was polite but forthright about her frustrations with Mt. Hope. Her problem was that there was neither a person nor a passion holding her there. This is not at all a problem at the Met. The large team listened carefully. Many sighed and nodded as she spoke.

She opened with an emphatic “I’m interested in music,” as though she’d already said it a hundred times to Mt. Hope without having been heard. “My problem with Mt. Hope was that I couldn’t choose my path. I had no say about my future. You don’t involve the students at all. The courses are all set out for you before you even get here. You said we have a choice, but it’s a choice between this English and that.”

At the Met, on the other hand, students learn in small groups guided by an adviser who helps them organize learning experiences for themselves, driven by their own passions. Bethany loves learning “all sorts of stuff” working in internships with professionals in the real world. Her adviser is available to help with mid-course corrections and identifying mentors who can guide her to her goals.

Ironically, Bethany’s one complaint about the Met is that they don’t have classes. So “a lot of the students can’t solve simple algebra problems, like they can here.”

She concludes, “If there were internships as well as regular classes, I never even would have thought of dropping out of here.” She also wanted mentors, adults who gave a fig about what she was doing and could offer credible guidance about how to pursue her “path.”

To keep the SIT from getting too bummed by their failure with Bethany, Crowley rallies the troops. “A problem is when there is a difference between what is and what should be.” No big deal. First they must refine their sense of the problem. They know that curbing dropouts requires “personalization,” but that idea also needs more concrete images and definition.

The SIT broke into smaller groups to think this through. The group I sat with struggled, quite consciously, to push their thinking beyond the habitual limits of their experience and training. Refreshingly, they were wary of bandaids and quick fixes.

They thought seriously about Bethany. Perhaps teachers could be on a staggered schedule so a student could have two music classes in one day? How can they teach a child the necessary core knowledge, but also respond to her needs and desires? At most high schools, including Mt. Hope, students’ needs and desires are just obstacles and interruptions to the real work — covering course content. It would be great to harness those passions, but how?

The challenge is daunting, but they are determined to overhaul the whole institution.

As the one to report out for his small group, English department head Patrick Jackson summed up the problem: “Mt. Hope is not a student-centered school that puts individual-student needs first. Period. Here’s some of the reasons why,” He started a list. “Start time is too early. The schedule doesn’t work. There’s no down time. No student input to decision making. And rules. Rules, rules, rules.”

He had more to say and apologized for “ranting.” But to my ears he sounded genuinely driven to fashion a much more interesting, engaging, rigorous and exciting school.

And the rest of the SIT seemed to agree, with yet another round of sighs and nods.

A double-digit dropout rate signals serious, on-going trouble for some students. And as we know from Bethany’s experience, schools that don’t take kids’ “paths” into consideration are at risk of losing them altogether. But putting the student’s experience at the center (as private schools do) requires nonbureaucratic, nonfactory-model ways of thinking about the design and task of high schools. Parents take note. If they succeed, Mt. Hope could become not just a rigorous, but also responsive high school — highly unusual in this state. Next week we’ll go into one of their classrooms and see what changes are being wrought there.

But for their School Improvement Team to take such criticism to heart — from a student who turned her back on them, no less — shows that this school is for real.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902