Covington Schools to overhaul middle school to include trades, subject pathways

The Covington Independent Public Schools Board of Education has voted to seek permission from the state to completely redesign the structure of teaching, scheduling and staffing at Holmes Middle School in an effort to bolster both enrollment and academic achievement at the district.

The board unanimously approved the move Thursday night, and statements from previous meetings of the board indicated the members were highly optimistic about the potential of the proposed plan, which would see a “whole school redesign,” said Principal Lee Turner during a presentation on Dec. 9, of the school’s curriculum structure, teaching philosophy, evaluation procedures and staffing framework if approved.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Board Member Kareem Simpson said on Dec. 9. “So, it sounds like you have been listening to us over the last three years, and put everything that we’ve been asking for into this proposal, and I am for it.”

The proposal would see the dissolution – or, at the very least, revision – of many of the conventional structures of public education.

Specifically, this would entail several key changes. Firstly, it would see the implementation of an interdisciplinary teaching structure, where teachers from different subject specialties would co-mingle instruction, rather than having everything siloed off.

Subjects would be organized into four pathways: humanities, STEM, applied and trades. Humanities would focus on communication, civic education and awareness of global events. STEM would focus on data literacy, technology skills and forms of scientific inquiry. The applied pathway would focus mostly on real-world skills like entrepreneurship and design. Trades would focus on, well, trades education, which has gained traction among school districts in NKY.

Holmes Middle School houses grades six through eight. Under the new structure, sixth graders would be able to explore all four pathways at their leisure to see what interests them. When they move to seventh grade, they will have to pick two tracks to focus on. In eighth grade, they would spend their time completing a capstone project in one of the specialty areas. Eighth graders could also pursue internships.

Turner and Holmes Middle School Science Teacher Rachel Blackwood said that this redesign is based on both community feedback and a desire to help students prepare for the modern world.

“Families have asked for more relevance, more hands-on learning and more future-ready preparation,” Blackwood told the board on Dec. 9, “and our regional workforce is asking for exactly the skills our students can develop through this model.”

“It is designed to directly address long standing gaps in achievement, engagement and student retention across grades five through eight,” Turner said.

Additionally, class schedules would move to extended, 90-minute block class sessions. The school would also employ adjunct instructors with subject expertise (but maybe no formal background in education) from around the community to augment the instruction from the regular teachers in hopes of increasing students’ exposure to real-world scenarios. Adjuncts would work under the supervision of the normal teachers.

Turner emphasized that this structure would be available to all student populations, including English language learners and students with IEPs. The proposal argues that the interdisciplinary approach to teaching would allow for the sharing of resources between different departments and provide better multilingual support.

How much all of this will cost remains to be determined, and Board President Tom Haggard said that he did want to “think through what the budget ramifications of this would be.” Turner noted that there was grant funding available for approved programs.

In spite of his caveat about the budget, Haggard, like the other board members, approved of the proposal and eventually voted in favor of it.

“I was just grinning the entire time,” Haggard said.

In order to do any of this, the district will need to get permission from the state board of education. This became allowable following the passage of Kentucky Senate Bill 207, which granted districts the ability to ask for waivers to typical administrative requirements and establish what have been dubbed schools of innovation.

Districts don’t have free rein to request waivers for everything. Federal requirements, civil rights requirements, criminal background checks for teachers, financial reporting, state assessment requirements and several other regulations can’t be touched, but others pertaining to how school days and instruction are structured are fair game. In order to get a waiver, a district must submit a written narrative identifying the laws it wants exemptions from and offer arguments as to how the waivers could improve student performance.

You can read the narrative that Covington Schools plans to submit to the state here.

The main sponsor of the bill was Kentucky Sen. Stephen West, a Republican from Paris, who told the General Assembly’s Budget Subcommittee on Education in September that he proposed the law after last year’s defeat of Amendment 2 at the ballot box, according to reporting from the Kentucky Lantern. Northern Kentucky Republican Senators Shelley Funke Frommeyer, Steve Rawlings and Gex Williams also sponsored the bill.

West, who is also the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, told lawmakers that the law allows “outside private investment” into the public education system.

“Everywhere you look in your life, choice is almost always better,” West said in September. “And so whether it’s the car you drive or the movie you go to or whatever, we demand choices. But for some reason in K-12, it’s been pretty stagnant, and there’s a lack of choice.” 

Critics of the bill feared this was a way of circumventing Amendment 2’s defeat. Kentucky Rep. Tina Bojanowski, a Democrat and public school teacher from Louisville, asked that with the legislation allowing Kentucky to “subcontract the management of a specific school to an outside entity” if that is “exactly what a charter school is.” 

West answered yes, but a main difference would be “the initiation of the request by the local district,” giving the public school district “more control” than under previously passed charter school legislation. West said such schools could also pay teachers more as an incentive outside of the school district pay scale. 

Outsourced management or investment does not appear in the Covington Schools proposal, however, and there’s no indication Holmes Middle School is seeking to restructure itself like a charter school at an administrative level.

The Kentucky Board of Education will rule on the middle school’s waiver requests in the coming months.

McKenna Horsley of the Kentucky Lantern contributed reporting to his story.