Class Acts

Nurturing young Einsteins at the local mall

To get a look at Yolo County’s cutting-edge program for struggling students, just drop by Woodland’s County Fair Mall shopping center.

Named for one of the world’s most creative scientific thinkers—who faced challenges himself as a young student—the Einstein Education Center is located about a hundred yards from the Target juniors department, around the corner from the magic fingers massage chairs and just across from the Gottschalks shoe department.
Scheduled to open its doors in August with an initial enrollment of 150 students, this alternative high school operated by the Yolo County Office of Education aims to make a significant dent in the 25 percent of the county’s young adult population that hasn’t finished high school. It’s reaching out to dropouts and also to younger students who are on the verge of quitting.

“We have 18- and 19-year-old dropouts who are waking up and realizing they’ve made a big mistake,” says Einstein Principal Linda Christopher-Miles. “We also have 14- to 18-year-olds who were on the rolls but who never came to school. Others were so credit-deficient they probably would never have finished. These are kids who have washed out of the public school system, and they’re in danger of being forgotten.”

The school serves students from five local districts, and its mandate fits perfectly with Yolo County employment and education goals for local residents.

“The Yolo County Workforce Investment Board set the countywide goal for all adults to have a minimum of a GED,” says Ronda Adams, associate county superintendent and chair of the county’s Youth Council. “We want to build a scaffold to support people who haven’t yet finished their education.”
There’s little doubt, say the school’s founders, that the county desperately needs an alternative school like Einstein.

Recent estimates indicate that a third of Yolo County residents between the ages of 18 and 25 do not have a high school diploma. There are about 2,000 young county residents between the ages of 14 and 21 who are not attending school. English learners, Hispanic males and low-income youth are most likely to leave school without graduating.
Locating the school at County Fair Mall made sense for a number of reasons—not the least of which is the fact that the mall itself provides plenty of employment and training opportunities for students interested in retail. Students turned off by conventional school settings might feel more at ease at this mall-based campus, school organizers say. The mall has other advantages; it’s centrally located and served by a number of regional bus lines. It also didn’t hurt that County Fair was undergoing a significant facelift, or that the mall’s new owner contributed toward the costs of remodeling the 6,000-square-foot space to suit the school’s needs.

At press time, staff was still putting the finishing touches on the state’s newest mall-based school. With racks of sale shoes visible from one window and the mall parking lot just outside the school’s storefront-style front entrance, the space is clearly unconventional. It does, however, have classrooms for math and science and English and language arts. The central open space between the classrooms will feature long banks of sleek computer stations, giving the place a business-like air in keeping with its career emphasis. Class sizes will be small, with a student-teacher ratio of 25 students for every teacher, and there will be a heavy emphasis on individual counseling.

To recruit students, Einstein organizers advertised in local papers, visited high schools throughout the county and contacted families with students who were struggling in school. If its inaugural year goes well, Einstein hopes to expand enrollment to 400 students in the fall of 2008.

Einstein is one of two new “Diploma Plus” schools opening this fall in California as part of a collaborative effort between the state Department of Education and the San Francisco-based New Ways to Work, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving education and job opportunities for young people. Up to now, Diploma Plus developers have concentrated on the East Coast, but they hope to open two more California schools in 2008.
Funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Diploma Plus schools use a curriculum that combines academics with a heavy dose of real-world career and technical education. Students proceed at their own respective paces in “phases” rather than moving through conventional grade-level groupings.

“Diploma Plus stresses competency rather than crediting students for seat time,” says Christopher-Miles.
Einstein students will take career and technical education courses, have internship opportunities through the county’s Regional Occupational Program and complete a career development portfolio. Each student will be certified as “work ready” before graduating.

Einstein will also stress academic rigor, requiring students to complete conventional classes in core subjects, prepare for and pass the California High School Exit Exam and take at least one course at nearby Woodland Community College before graduating.

“Just getting students on a real college campus will be valuable,” says Christopher-Miles. “We want the experience to seem less intimidating, and we want them to see how many opportunities and exciting things go on at college. We want to demystify the experience.”