By Daphne Jackson
Darby High School is using funds provided by a donation from a former student to start new community and schoolwide projects, including a personalized learning program for its students.
The recent endowment also provided for Shelby Rogala’s position as the school’s new Community Outreach Coordinator. As such, Rogala splits her time between public relations, fundraising and community projects.
“The first is PR,” she said. “Anything from trying to build our social media presence for our students and our parents and our community members on Facebook… to looking at how we make sure that our presence and our outreach to the community is proactive and positive, and that nobody has to come to us, and say ‘well, what’s going on with this, what’s going on with that?’ We’re trying to reach those concerns ahead of time, and open the dialog.”
Rogala said the fundraising aspect of her job applies to both individual teachers’ projects, such as field trips, and to the school as a whole.
“With the endowment that we received, obviously we want to make sure that we’re using it appropriately and responsibly, and that we’re making it last as long as we can, and leveraging it,” Rogala said. “It opens us up to, in the future, being able to look at some larger grants. If they require matching funds, we have those matching funds. So that’s kind of the second part of my job, writing grants and things like that.”
Rogala said she relies on input from others within the school and the community to help her decide which projects to focus on.
“I’m trying to prioritize things, because at the end of the day, my job is to support Darby students and Darby staff, as well as build our connection with the Darby community,” she said. “If there’s already somebody that’s excited about a project, that will go on my board. What I don’t think this position can be is me sitting in my office, deciding what I think is important for the students, or what I think is important for the staff, and typing furiously away on my computer. It really has to be what ideas are coming to me, and what initiatives or issues that we seeing a growing support for, and how we can create a team effort to address those issues.”
Rogala said one of her roles has been to start an alumni association for the school, a project that started with Darby’s homecoming last month.
“I am a Darby alum, I graduated in 2008,” said Rogala, “but I never imagined I’d be back at home, googling homecoming alumni parade ideas on a laptop. So it was a very daunting task to look at, like ‘oh my gosh, how are we going to create an alumni association that means things to people, that it’s just not solely a fundraising arm, but that will have a meaningful effect on our students as well.’”
Upon his death, alumnus Archie Lorentzen left the school an endowment from the sale of several properties he owned throughout the state, a total of nearly $3 million at this point, Rogala said. She said the school invested the money, and has been using the interest to fund its new projects, including her position, which started in August.
In addition to community projects, the school has begun the implementation of a personalized learning program to help address the needs of individual students.
Darby Superintendent Loyd Rennaker – also an alum – said he first became interested in personalized learning during a presentation at a national conference last spring.
“It just really kind of resonated with me that that’s something that could help all of our students in our school,” said Rennaker, “and so when I came back from that conference, I started doing some research. I bought a book, a couple of books actually, and read through them, and started reading online some articles and information that I could find, and then I started talking to people here, and I got a couple people that were pretty interested in seeing some changes made.”
Rennaker said the goal is to have the program completely implemented by either the 2018 or 2019 school year, at which point all the teachers will have their content online, and students will be able to choose which classes to focus on, and have more flexibility in their schedules.
“Really what it comes down to is that a kid, working with their mentor, will be able to make decisions,” he said. “Just example-wise, a kid could say ‘you know, I really don’t like biology, so I’m just going to focus on biology for three weeks, or four weeks, and get it all done, and then that’ll be out of my mind, and I can work toward another credit’ so it just gives them a lot of control over their curriculum and what they’re learning.”
In this, the first year, Rennaker said the school is starting with three teachers who have content online and an adult mentor for each of the 115 high school students. He said the school will have to make some adjustments as students use the program, and develop systems for each student to be successful. This is a trend within several schools across the country, Rennaker said, including at least four other schools in Montana.
Rennaker said the school is also experimenting with “flexible schedule days” that allow students to focus on areas where they need extra help. He said the school will have a few of these days this year. He said the rest of Darby’s teachers will continue using professional development time to prepare their content for an online platform.
“We didn’t buy a ready-made online program,” Rennaker said. “Those exist, but we wanted our teachers to have control over our curriculum and what the students are being taught. The company we’re using has some templates, it has some information, but we’re adding and taking things away that don’t apply to our curriculum. We’re going to allow our teachers to continue working on their content.”
