More Powell High School students are passing class and taking advantage of second chances this year.

Powell High saw a 40% decrease in the number of courses being failed and roughly a 52% decrease in the number of students failing two or more courses in October, in part thanks to a tiered intervention system and new grading guidelines.

“The biggest message out there is just the fact that we’re after more than just work completion, we’re after quality work completion,” Assistant Principal Steve Lensegrav said. “And so again, if they don’t do well on an assignment, or didn’t fully write the essay, or didn’t turn in the art project, or … they turned it in just to check a box, that’s not good enough, we’re saying, ‘no, we want you to turn it in but we want you to turn in a quality piece of work.’”

The new intervention system also allocates student time so they can work to improve their grade on assignments. It is a support system, not a punishment, Principal Tim Wormald said.

Communication from parents has also been positive, because the new system gives students who did not do well on an assignment or test a chance to have a do-over while still requiring the student to earn it, Lensegrav said.

“Failure is a part of the learning process, and when students struggle, we need to come alongside them and help them overcome some of those learning gaps,” Lensegrav said. “And really, when students experience a little bit of success, we find that that breeds more success.”

The new tiered system of intervention at Powell High School — Completion, Proficiency and Recovery (CPR), is designed to help students engage in this learning process by allowing retakes and resubmissions after they have completed “relearning” that takes place in tiers.

The first tier takes place over Panther Time, a sort of study period for students, or the student’s lunch period Monday through Thursday for up to one week. If the student has not completed the work in that amount of time they move to Tier 2 which is one hour of after school time in addition to Tier 1 also on Monday through Thursday. If the assignment is not completed in this week the student will be enrolled in an hour of night school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Jason Quigley, who oversees the interventions, said students of all walks of life participate in CPR  Some of the higher achieving students voluntarily come in so that they can try to improve their test scores, “they got a 92, they want a 98,” he said. Other students know what they need to do and complete their assignment before showing up for their Tier 1 intervention. 

Quigley added that the seniors sometimes have a difficult time adjusting to the new practices but said that he thinks the system has been great.

The high school had begun looking into the idea of consistent grading across departments last January and came to the conclusion that “we needed to align our practices to kind of simplify things a little bit for everybody.”

The new system divides grading into two categories: academic practice and academic performance, which make up, respectively, 25% and 75% of the grade book. The idea is that when students and parents look at their grades “from one class to the next, they should have a good idea that there’s an average performance in there,” Lensegrav said.

Under the new grading guidelines teachers grade on an A-F scale that reflects students’ proficiency in terms of standards, content, performance and the regularity they perform in the assigned grade category. 

This has been an easy transition for some classes while other teachers have had to figure out what category their content falls into.

“I think for some departments, it’s been pretty easy, for others, it’s been a stretch, I think some of them are still trying to figure out what assignments would go into the different [categories]. Math, for example, it’s a pretty easy transition, because they had a homework bin, they also had like a midterm bin and a final bin and that sort of thing … but the other departments, it’s not been quite as easy.”

While it is no small task, both Lensegrav and Wormald applauded the work of the teachers, registrar Amber Beaudry and Quigley, the new student success coordinator who oversees interventions.

“I’m super proud of our staff for working as hard as they have, and there are challenges that we’re all trying to figure out together,” Wormald said. “We’re kind of diving into this, it takes a lot of trust in each other and a lot of trust in the process that this is going to work.”