Ninth Grade Success is Truly a Team Effort

Ninth Grade Success is Truly a Team Effort

The first morning bus isn’t set to arrive at Milwaukie High School for more than an hour. Still, a small group of dedicated staff members is already on campus, pushing together a group of student desks to create a makeshift early-morning meeting space within a third-floor classroom.  Although each of the team members teaches a different subject, they gather each week to help achieve the same goal—making sure every ninth grader is earning enough credits to remain on track toward graduation in four years.
 
The conversations aren’t always easy. There’s the student who continually misses first period because he has to ensure his elementary siblings get to school. Or the classmate living with a relative as her family searches for affordable housing. And some freshmen don’t have secure housing at all.
 
Still, MHS teachers Adrianne Cohen, Kathleen Fuller, Hyacinth Schukis, and counselor Roberto Aguilar forego extra breakfast time once a week as one of four “Ninth Grade On-Track Teams,” each overseeing one-fourth of Milwaukie and Milwaukie Academy of the Arts’ nearly 300 freshmen, coming up with creative ways to keep their students engaged and invested in school so ninth grade attendance doesn’t falter and grades don’t slip.

 
“He’s incredibly bright and very peer-motivated,” Fuller chimes in as the discussion shifts to one of her Biology students. “Maybe he’s failing other classes because he doesn’t have friends in them.”
 
“OK, who feels like you have a good enough relationship with him to ask about those classes?” asks Math teacher Cohen, who leads the weekly discussions as the school’s Ninth Grade Coach.
 
“He’s pretty confident when communicating with me,” adds Schukis, who teaches the student’s English class. “He’s a good self-advocate and I’ll be happy to talk with him.”
 
Just like at Milwaukie High, every freshman throughout NCSD is strategically placed on an “On-Track Team,” meaning a group of approximately 60-100 ninth graders all have the same teachers for core subjects like Math, Language Arts, and Science. That means their core teachers often know as much about their students’ lives outside of school as they do about their attendance rates and latest test results, which leads to personal connections helping motivate students to succeed in their first year of high school and beyond. 
 
Adrienne C. Nelson High freshman Hank Villa Tapia smiles while telling a story about Ninth Grade Coach Laurie Thurston tracking him down in a hallway while he was trying to avoid attending class. “I even started speed-walking when I saw her coming, but she actually ran after me to make sure I got to class. In a way, that made me feel good because I knew she had my back.”
 
Every NCSD high school reports that both freshman attendance rates and quarterly grades continue to grow as the teams consistently build personal relationships.
 
“You can’t teach them until you reach them,” says Thurston as she leads a recent early morning On-Track Team meeting at Nelson, the district’s largest high school with more than 400 ninth graders making up four different freshman cohorts.
 
On a recent April morning, Thurston and her early-rising teammates spend the first few minutes of the meeting hand-writing encouraging postcards to students who have made dramatic improvements in the past several weeks. When Geometry teacher Bethany Chan shares her latest postcard nominee, the group cheers.

 
And at each of NCSD’s high schools, teachers aren’t the only ones cheering the success of these dedicated Ninth Grade On-Track Teams.  Students who were once struggling say it’s nice to know their teachers truly care about them.
 
“At the beginning of the year, my grades weren’t very good and I was getting into lots of drama,” explains Nelson freshman Harper Sneed. “But Ms. Thurston kept meeting with me, helping me catch up on assignments little by little, and kept checking on me during class. She’s helped me keep my grades up and now they’re the best they’ve been since fifth grade.”
 
“We’re teaching kids those habits of mind when it comes to work,” sums up Thurston. “How do I ask for more help? How do I advocate for myself? How do I stay in the work when it gets hard? We’re helping kids identify what that feels like instead of running and avoiding, and there’s no better time to do that than the first year they come into high school.”