Document text
Ashland High's 'stick-to-itiveness' Ashland High School Assistant Principal Jay Preskenis helps kids with personal and academic challeneges find success. Daily Tidings / Denise baratta Monday Dec 5, 2016 at 12:01 AM Joe Zavala Ashland Daily Tidings @Joe_Zavala99 When Jay Preskenis watches the Ashland High School graduation ceremony each June from his fold-up chair at Lithia Park, he appreciates the walk, diploma handoff and traditional mortarboard toss-up in a way few in the audience — AHS staffers included — can. That’s because as a member of the school’s Student Services Team, Ashland High’s assistant principal knows exactly what some of those students had to overcome in order to arrive at that moment, and even now, only three months into the nine-month school year, he laughs out loud at the memory of dozen, two dozen, a hundred dozen success stories. “Oh, it’s amazing,” Preskenis said, drawing out the second "a" to make it "amaaaaaaaaazing." “You know that they’ve overcome obstacles that no one has ever seen and they look like it’s run of the mill, one of 270 other kids graduating and you know what familial obstacles they’ve overcome, what social obstacles they’ve overcome, what possible illnesses they’ve overcome, and you’re enormously proud that they’ve had the grit and the stick-to-itiveness to hold down a part-time job, to continue to play baseball, to take care of their little sister and to get a 2.5 GPA so that they could qualify for the Oregon Promise. “And they’ve done all those things kind of quietly and shown up for class every day, and you know that as a first-year student at Ashland High School they were ready to drop out. It’s crazy. It’s so amazing.” But, it doesn’t happen by accident, or through sheer willpower, at least not willpower alone. In fact, that satisfying final act that Preskenis and the other 10 members of Ashland High’s Student Services Team witness at the end of every school year is, for many of the at-risk students he’s referring to, made possible only through careful planning, teamwork and the AHS staff’s own “stick-to-itiveness.” Essentially, the Student Services Team, which meets once a week and is referred to by staff as the SST, is tasked with helping teachers and other staff identify at-risk students and track their challenges, which can run the gamut, from drug addictions and parental neglect to anxiety disorders and financial hardship. All this information is logged away in a flow chart — a recent touch implemented for the first time at the start of the current school year — and used to make sure teachers and counselors make informed decisions regarding outbursts, absences, low grades, etc. Guidance councilor Diane Berry, who Preskenis credited with championing the use of a flow chart, says Ashland High’s approach to Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS) is nothing new, nor is it easy to execute. “Making (PBIS’s) developmentally appropriate for older kids is a little bit trickier, but there are some aspects to the approach that make a lot of sense,” she said. “Basically, what I brought in is saying, let’s get a little bit more methodical, a little bit more sophisticated with our approach. And that’s borrowing, really from the PBIS model, where we really look at kids with different criteria in mind and we kind of see them in groups. We see them as kind of our stronger, resilient ones, beginning to show some at-risk behavior or difficulties, all the way up to our really small group of very high needs kids. And obviously, those are typically ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) kids who are going to respond to stress in their life in a much more dramatic way because they’ve already dealt with layers of trauma or challenges.” How this all looks in practice depends on a host of factors, which is why teachers must be flexible. Alternative education teacher Reed Sorensen, who’s in his 11th year at AHS and teaches the Thoreau program for freshmen and sophomores and the Catalyst program for junior and seniors, says the ultimate goal for each of his students is to graduate but getting there can be tricky. That’s because the students in each of his classes, which are capped at 17 students to minimize the student-to-teacher ratio, are there because they’ve been classified as at-risk for dropping out and may have trouble functioning in a crowded classroom. The first step, Sorensen says, has nothing to do with math equations or analyzing a piece of literature. Early on, it’s about getting to a place where learning can happen. “Many of my students are coming with some sort of trauma in their background,” he said, “whether that’s a social trauma that happened at a school with a teacher or peers, or something more severe that happened with their family or to them. But most of them have that as a common thread, so one of the things that I really do is I just try to hold a space where they feel safe and my first priority is recognizing them as people and helping them identify what it is that’s going on with them before we really start focusing in on the academics part of it. Because without them feeling secure, feeling safe, the academics part is really pointless. They’re not even able to access it.” Site-based teacher Lindsay McNeill echoed those thoughts and illustrated why it’s important, especially when it comes to at-risk students, to be able to adjust on the fly. “It’s all the time, but it’s natural for me so I guess I’m lucky,” she said. “I’m very malleable, quick to change. So if, for instance, it’s obvious that a student’s not engaging with the material, if that student has ADHD then I have them use their hands or I have them get up and have them be the one writing on the board, or have them doing something active that helps them to re-engage. “I’m very aware of when they’re having bad days and when they’re having good days, and making sure that I don’t trigger them. But the best thing is that in our setting, we create a sense of community first, and then learning comes second. And it really is to provide students with that safe place where it almost becomes a second family for them. And then a lot of their needs are met there, too. We have food, we had a Thanksgiving feast last week. So it’s really about building trust and having a place where they can come together with other people and feel safe.” The end result is that McNeill’s community, a sort of school within a school, draws in together like a family, strengthening the individuals. It’s amazing to see, McNeill said, and painful to say goodbye come graduation. “At the end of the year we always go on a hike or something,” she said, “and I share what I’ve seen in them and how I’ve seen them grow and I can’t keep myself from crying because it’s amazing to see the amount of growth that they exhibit being in that community setting.” Joe Zavala is a reporter for the Ashland Daily Tidings. Reach him at 541-821-0829 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @Joe_Zavala99.