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| Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy for Young Women's original building facade and lunchroom. Photo by the author. |
Let me back up. Portland Public Schools have been in the midst of one of the more difficult restructurings it's been through in a while. In a response to shifting demographic trends, the numbers of students in PPS have shrunk over the past couple of decades. Less children are living in the city and more in the suburbs like Beaverton, Sherwood, Tigard/Tualatin, etc. This has resulted in some hard decisions of restructuring of School District #1. The most visible of these was the recent high school redesign process that went through many iterations. Originally two high schools were to be closed. Then one, while Benson became a half-day technical option. But finally it seemed settled with most schools staying as they are with one high school, Marshall, being closed and students reassigned.
Almost shattered in the high school redesign is a nearly invisible diamond in the rough, the smallest of high schools in the city. Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy for Young Women is the only public single-gender school in the state. The Young Women's Academy (YWA) is under the umbrella of Jefferson High School, which is located about two miles north. This school services students grades 6-12, and its future in its current form was held in the balance, slated to be a possible victim of the redesign process. As it is structured right now, there are 63 high school students in the total population amounting to about 1/3 of the student body. YWA has many things going for it that other public schools in the city don't first, unlike Jefferson's failed and shuttered boys academy, the single-gender setting is successful. I have some thoughts about this. For an all-boys school to be successful, it is my belief that it requires the type of structure that is not easy to find in a public school. While boys might see single-gender as a negative, girls see single-gender as a positive; they see it as refuge from the distractions that interactions between the sexes can cause on a daily basis. This school also has a loose uniform/dress code that allows a small amount of flexibility, while maintaining the underlying the, well, uniformity that this code maintains.
Test scores among the higher grades are consistently higher at YWA than they are at Jefferson High School, but due to the way the academy structured being under Jefferson's wing, test scores are reported as a combined data set. Consequently YWA can be making AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) but because they are still a part of Jefferson, they still suffer from that school's problems. They are also dependent on Jefferson for money, but that's a story left for another post. There was talk at one point of spinning YWA from Jefferson entirely, being allowed to sink or swim independently from the larger high school, but those plans are now tabled.
As a part of the high school redesign, there was tremendous uncertainty about the future facing the school with one of the most recent plans being to eliminate high school all together and keep the remaining three grades as a middle school in the same form. This was extremely short-sighted. If you are going to think strategically about a problem, you have to be prepared to work on it over the long term. Fortunately, and possibly due to extreme pressure from a dedicated parent base, the YWA is going to continue in its present format, as a 6-12 school. I believe that it would have been wrong for the (so far successful) experiment to be scaled back before it had an opportunity to see the payoff of young inner-city women going to college.
PPS saw the light, and I'm very pleased.
