This is the first in a three-part series about how Providence’s Hope High School redeemed itself from being an educational blight.

The kids in the community still call it “Hopeless High.” Reputations change slowly.

Housed in a handsome 1930s building on Providence’s toney East Side, Hope High School had long been abandoned, not merely by the neighborhood’s middle class, but by any family that had the wherewithal to keep their kid out of there. The police cars often parked outside confirmed the stereotype of the urban blackboard jungle it had become. Test scores occasionally dipped into single digits. The 2000 dropout rate was 56 percent.

“It was a dropout factory,” says state Commissioner of Education Peter McWalters. “The school was a dramatic example of where the worst of all things was happening.”

So in 2002, the commissioner intervened.

Back then — as now — Hope’s 1,400 students were predominantly poor, almost all minorities, and almost all bused in from the city’s mean-streets neighborhoods. Roughly one-third required special education. Another third were English Language Learners. Then, as now, about 40 percent of the students were “mobile,” meaning they leave and are replaced by new students in the course of the year.

Traditional, “factory-model” schools like Hope were designed to sort and sift kids, shedding all but those who could tolerate an impersonal, joyless academic instruction. The rest used to be considered acceptable casualties, who could go into a manufacturing economy that now no longer exists.

In 2002, McWalters ordered the district to restructure the school, knowing he had limited money and staff to assert his authority. But he had a vision for Hope: “We wanted a 21st-century school that has a collegial attitude. We wanted adults watching over each kid, all four years. To do that, you have to respect the teachers by giving them time for student advisory meetings, time for planning, time for professional development. And they need stability. (Hope had a constant turnover of teachers and administrators.)

There’s emerging evidence that teacher stability, selection and placement are a huge factor in success. So they needed control over hiring. In the end, our interventions were just a collection of best practices. We wanted Hope to be the lighthouse for other schools.”

The state asked the school, district and union to come up with a plan of their own. In good faith, the Providence teachers union, district administrators and Hope faculty worked at restructuring the school. But for the life of them, they couldn’t agree. The district rejected certain initiatives as too expensive; the faculty was internally divided about others. McWalters said, “They went into the planning process and fell into a spin cycle. The school couldn’t get out of its own way.”

So in 2004, McWalters and his staff crafted a plan out of the best elements the faculty had devised. The school would have three separate academies, each with its own principal. The state invested money in extra staff and training to see them through the initial work of a total overhaul.

The resulting plan, called the “Hope Order,” added the fiercely unpopular stipulation that the school had to be “reconstituted.” That meant the teachers could not keep their jobs at the school unless they signed a letter agreeing to all the aspects of the state’s plan — to advisories, site-based decision-making, mandatory professional development.

Many were furious and insulted. Exactly half of the faculty, 54 out of 108, refused to sign and went to other schools.

Over the summer of 2005, the three new academy principals had to hire half the faculty. But who would come to a notoriously chaotic school, except teachers other schools had rejected? After scores of interviews, their yield was small. So they sent recruitment letters to colleges all over New England. At last they managed to assemble a staff who had literally signed on to a common set of best practices.

Not until this point does the story of redemption really begin, because only at this point were all the adults at Hope committed to one vision. And since then, only 8 of the original 108 teachers have retired or moved away. The team kept growing stronger.

But staff stability, planning time, advisories and the like are merely conditions that make success possible. Not guaranteed, just possible. A 21st-century, humane school structure does not by itself produce swell test scores. In fact, many schools have plugged away at splashy educational initiatives only to find they had nothing to show for them years hence.

Not Hope.

In the most recent round of statewide NECAP test scores, the reading scores tripled in the Information Academy — from 20 percent proficient to 60. The Leadership and Arts Academies nearly tripled their reading achievement as well. Granted, they started low. But the Arts Academy’s 65 percent proficient is the highest reading score of any comparable urban high school in the state, except for two charter schools.

Hope made gains in math and writing as well. It may sound pathetic, but climbing to 10 percent proficient from zero, with that bear of a math test, really is progress. Statewide, only 27 percent of the high-school juniors tested proficient. Hope’s administrators, Scott Sutherland and Arthur-Paul Petrocinelli, were quick to say they weren’t satisfied with the current scores. But after their sweaty trudge up from Hope’s dark days, they were clearly feelin’ real good.

How did they do it? We’ll look at their nationally-recognized advisory program next week, and their curriculum strategy the week after.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.