New Beach school hopes to mix innovation, success

VIRGINIA BEACH

Middle school art teacher Nancy Habit doesn't know exactly what to expect when she starts teaching at Virginia Beach's new alternative school next year. But she likes what she's hearing about teamwork and new technology.

The stakes are high for the city's first alternative school for grades 6 through 12. Administrators see it as a testing ground for innovative instructional techniques and online learning they hope to take citywide. Already-struggling students who fail at the new school will have few other options.

Byron Williams, the school's director, said his goal is to send students back to their home schools at or above their grade level. "This is not a warehousing activity. They are there to learn, and we are there to teach," he said.

This week, educators hired from 19 city schools will start to find out their program and course assignments for the fall. Four alternative programs will merge this summer and be called Renaissance Academy. But for the first months of the school year, the programs will remain at separate sites. They will move in shifts into an eco-friendly, $66.2 million building near Witchduck Road starting in January 2010.

Since alternative education took off in Virginia Beach and elsewhere around the country in the early 1990s, the city's various programs for students with academic or behavioral troubles have shared buildings or inherited older, unwanted facilities. Discipline problems have been common, and test scores at the three main programs have been well below division averages.

"When children give up, it is often because people have given up on them," Superintendent Jim Merrill said. "And if we take a hard look at ourselves, then we can't discount the fact that we have failed to engage them along the way."

Williams said he'll change the way alternative education works in the city. Renaissance will have extended hours, bus transportation, vocational courses and offerings including foreign languages, art and music. After-school clubs and intramural sports will be established for the first time.

Sports could motivate students to keep their grades up, said Kahana Glenn, who attended Virginia Beach Central Academy this year and will be a junior at Renaissance in the fall. He said his biggest concern about the school is security.

Middle and high school students will be in separate sections. Within those sections, students at the school for academic reasons will attend classes on different floors from those there for behavioral reasons. The school will open with about 800 students but has room for twice as many.

Merrill said Renaissance will be a place "for giving children what they need when they need it." That means making school relevant to their lives.

Williams said instruction schoolwide will be arranged around a quarterly theme such as "My Place in the World." Each student will have an individual academic plan and will work on a project of his or her choosing with a mentor teacher.

With a startup budget of $750,000, the school plans to join online projects such as Quest Atlantis, a multi-user learning game based in an alternative world.

Technology "is their world," said Gail Gossage, a Salem Middle School teacher who will be among the 25 percent of Renaissance teachers coming from mainstream schools. To succeed, learning needs to be hands-on, she said.

Kahana, 15, said the school's name gives him hope.

"In history, it means rebirth and change. It'll be a little inspirational thing - a reminder," he said.

Habit, the art teacher, sees it the same way. Next fall, as her students wait to move into the new building, she knows what she'll tell them.

"You're going to a new building because we believe in you."

Lauren Roth, (757) 222-5133, lauren.roth@pilotonline.com