Smaller school means added flexibility, more community involvement to Lajes
By David Josar, Stars
and Stripes 
Lajes High School is in the middle of tiny Terceira Island, an island
10 miles wide and 18 miles long where electric outages are regular events.
The high school has fewer than 200 students in seventh through 12th
grades, and this year the graduating class had 22 students.
The 20 teachers are stretched too thin to offer regular classes like
advancement placement calculus or even health. And there aren’t enough students to
field a conventional football team; instead, the kids form a flag football squad that
plays other teams in the community.
Still, students at this school, about 900 miles west of Lisbon,
Portugal, are among the brightest in all of the Department of Defense Dependents
Schools-Europe, according to a Stars and Stripes analysis of standardized test scores.
Lajes High School students get the second-highest average score
within DODDS on the science and social studies portions of the Comprehensive Test of Basic
Skills. A higher percentage of 10th-graders — 52 percent — here are rated
“distinguished” on the Department of Defense Education Activity writing
assessment than at 27 of the 35 other high schools in DODDS-Europe.
“We’re a small school and that’s a disadvantage
because we can’t offer the courses or selection like Kaiserslautern [High School]
offers,” said Lajes principal Jerry Ashby, who last year was the principal at
Kaiserslautern in Germany. “But we try to make up for that by being as flexible as
possible.”
The innovations appear to be working.
Courtesy of Lajes High School
Small classes, like this band class at Lajes High School in Portugal, help teachers give
students more personal time, administrators say. Lajes' test scores consistently rank at
the top of the DODDS-Europe scale. |
Advanced placement calculus, for example, is taught via long-distance
learning, where students receive lessons and take exams using a computer linked to the
Internet and a teacher at another DODDS school.
“We make sure they get the courses they need,” Ashby said.
“We don’t just say, ‘There’s a computer.’”
The same for health class, where Lajes students are taught by a Rota,
Spain, instructor who teaches via Internet broadcast and gives assignments completed and
returned via e-mail.
There is “Re-teach, Re-test,” a daily class period for
students who struggled on recent exams to catch up. Teachers go over the material again to
give the students another chance to master it. The students then can take another test and
keep the new grade.
“We make sure they do better,” he said.
Sushil Shenoy and Kyle Smith — both of whom graduated in June
— were members of the informal Distance Education Club, a group of about six students
who met regularly after school in the library.
“They’re high fliers. They’re the ones who make the
1300s and 1400s on their SATs,” Ashby said. “They’re highly motivated and
support each other. In turn, we support them.”
Shenoy, the son of an Air Force lieutenant colonel who is a
physician, said using the computer and working with his peers is stimulating.
“The work can be very time-consuming and the questions are
tough,” said Shenoy, who took advanced placement calculus over the Internet.
“Sometimes we stay after school until 5 or 6 p.m., or even later.”
Courtesy of Lajes High School
Students at Lajes High School often tutor each other. Although Lajes High School is one of
the smallest in the Department of Defense Dependents Schools-Europe, its standardized test
scores place it in the top of DODDS schools in Europe. |
Smith, who now is attending Hiram College in Ohio, embraced the small
student body at Lajes.
“It’s a lot easier to know the teachers, and to talk to
them in the hallway. The school just isn’t packed,” said Smith, whose mother is
a DODDS elementary school teacher on the island.
One reason teachers and staff think students excel at the Lajes
schools (the elementary school there ranked in the Stars and Stripes’ top 15) is the
island environment.
“There are no shopping malls here. Everyone comes to school all
the time. There are no cuts,” said teacher Eileen Kless, who has taught at Lajes for
four years.
The lack of distractions, Kless said, has turned Lajes High School
into a meeting place for students — and even other members of the community —
after the final bell of the day.
“Even after class, many people hang around to participate,”
she said.
Look at what happened there the last week of May.
The walls in the classrooms had peeling, fading paint and needed
freshening up. Other schools in the then-Turkey/Spain/Islands District, however, had
needed safety improvements that gobbled up any extra money.
So the school got paint from the base’s self-help store and
found 60 volunteers, both parents and military community members, to do the work.
A larger community, Ashby said, might not have so readily donated
their time.
Fewer students means kids are thrust into roles they wouldn’t
find themselves in at larger schools. “Everyone gets a chance to be a leader here.
You wouldn’t expect the class presidents to be who he or she is here,” Kless
said.
She particularly praises the “Re-teach, Re-test” program.
In most schools, a math teacher working on factoring polynomials, for
example, must move to the next subject after a test. But not at Lajes, where
“Re-teach, Re-test” gives students more time to master difficult subjects.
“That takes a lot of effort for the teacher, but the students
are really being taught,” Kless said.
The Parent, Teacher Student Association (PTSA) is a routine sounding
board for complaints about education and the school — but not at Lajes.
“Our biggest complaints are things like there’s a lot of
traffic in the morning when kids are getting dropped off for school,” said Stacie
Moreno, president of the Lajes High School PTSA.
Moreno also is a teacher's aide in a special education class and her
daughter, Alyssa, attended kindergarten at Lajes Elementary School.
Teachers and parents, Moreno said, find that the school’s small
size translates into a lot of extra help. “Kids here do well for a reason.
That’s because they’re not allowed to fail,” she said.
Still, there are downsides to being small, Ashby said.
For one, the teaching staff is spread thin — one teacher covers
ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade English, advanced placement literature and a drama class
— yet the instructors still need to ensure their students get the best education
possible.
For seventh- and eighth-grade students with low grades, a teacher
volunteered to run a study skills class. “There are a lot of safety nets for our
kids,” Ashby said. “And we let them help each other out when they can.”
The intimate environment means Lajes’ staff can catch and can
help students who would be lost in the shuffle at larger schools. “We know every
student,” he said.
Ashby pointed to one student who had transferred from Kaiserslautern
as an example. That student needed a required history course he previously failed that
wasn’t offered at Lajes or via long-distance learning. Ashby found a teacher who
could help the student during a free period.
“At a larger school, that wouldn’t have happened,”
said Ashby, who has worked in DODDS-Europe since 1981. “But here we were able to
accommodate him.”
Perhaps that is what makes the biggest difference.
“One of our strong points here is that we are small enough that
everyone knows each others. We’re not just teachers, we’re family friends,”
Ashby said. “No student will fall through the cracks — that’s something I
can’t say about the larger places I’ve been.”
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