This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, June 26, 2013: Stephanie Krauss remembers clearly a moment when she saw that her vision for Shearwater, a charter school giving new chances to teens whose education had been interrupted by life, might not work.
“I had a student in my office who had been with us for a long time,” she said earlier this week in an interview at the Shearwater campus on the grounds of Ranken Technical College in north St. Louis.
“He came in performing at a first- and second-grade level, and he had a transcript that said he was in 11th grade. He couldn’t read. He said, ‘You know, Ms. Krauss, I’m going to graduate from Shearwater because I’ve been here for a long time.’
“Couched in that comment was that for 11 grades, he was told he was on track to graduate, and he could not read. That many years of believing something creates a philosophical mindset that takes a long time to dismantle.”
After two years of planning and three years of classes, Krauss announced on May 17 that Shearwater would close at the end of the school year, today, when its last two graduates will receive their diplomas. She said that the work of the Shearwater Education Foundation would continue, trying to solve the knotty problem of how best to serve a difficult-to-reach student population.
Though the results for the school may have fallen far short of its goals, Krauss clearly is proud of the work Shearwater has done, and she is convinced that the need it was designed to fill is greater than ever.
“I am so disappointed,” she said. “We had the right methodology and approach. This is one more example that this is not yet the time for these young people to have quality education options, and without us here serving these young people, that gap of services will get bigger.
“I’m sad for our students who still identify Shearwater as a family and as a community, for the students who were with us in the past and who won’t have a place to come back to, for the students who were considering us and applied but no longer have us as an option and for the students who are still in the building to the end.”
In the end, Krauss said, the problem was that the current environment gives too little support to schools trying to reach students who have wandered off the academic path and may have a tough time finding their way back.
“I realized that for the uphill battle we were facing collectively, we were not in the right shape,” she said. “We had trained to scale the Ozarks, and we were up against the Himalayan mountains.”
Dreams and actions, plans and beliefs
Tucked away in a top-floor office as the school was being closed down were two signs that could sum up the Shearwater experience.
A large one, sitting on the floor across from Krauss’ desk, said:
“To accomplish great things we must not only act but also dream, not only plan but also believe.”
A smaller one behind her desk chair read:
“Remember, there are no mistakes, only lessons.”
Krauss’ dreams and plans for Shearwater grew out of her own experiences. In alcohol and drug rehab at age 15, she earned her GED a year later and was a college graduate two years after that. She joined Teach for America, worked in education overseas and with gangs in Houston and earned two master's degrees, including one in social work from Washington University in 2008, at the age of 22.
Her inspiration, she said, was a social worker who pointed her to Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida. “He was an adult I trusted,” she said, “and he said it seemed like a good college for me, so that was the only one I applied to. Thank God I got in.”
Shearwater was designed to provide similar guidance for students whose education had been interrupted by their life circumstances. Being on the Ranken campus, she said, could show the students that not that much separated them from continuing their education after high school.
She did research and worked with scores of community organizations to prepare for the opening of the school, choosing for its name an Australian seabird that is constantly on the move, with no home of its own.
The goal was that three out of four Shearwater students would graduate with a high school degree and be ready for college, a full-time job or a plan for their own business.
The school opened in the fall of 2010 with 75 students, and over its three years enrolled about 300 teens total. But 20 percent of them were in class for less than a month, either withdrawing voluntarily or being suspended or expelled. Nearly half dropped out at some point, though some came back. About 35 percent were dismissed for a behavior infraction.
Three students were murdered.
By the time Krauss announced that Shearwater would close, from its initial enrollment of 75, the class lists had dwindled to 17. In its three years of existence, the school had a total of 13 graduates, including the two receiving their diplomas this afternoon.
'Courage, bravery, intelligence, potential'
Krauss’ message got through strongly to one of those two graduates, Gabrielle Bishop. A speech she wrote to deliver at her commencement ceremony tells how she thought at first that Shearwater was “just another GED program,” but she soon learned it was more like a college prep school. “They treated me like the adult I am today and showed me respect,” she said.
“I came to Shearwater not knowing who I was, who I wanted to be or what I wanted to accomplish,” Gabrielle added. “I kept doubting myself and saying, ‘I cannot do it. I’m not smart enough.’ And they had people here to support me, counselors staff and teachers….When I saw that I wasn’t progressing, I left for a month, and for those four weeks I was gone I learned nothing, back at square one. This was not who I wanted to be. This is not who I am….
“The school made me realize that I wasn’t alone and also the strengths I have possessed: courage, bravery, intelligence and potential. So as I started attending my classes every day and focused on what I needed to do to get that diploma, I started believing in myself and God more and more…. And it made me become a better person inside and out. Now my journey of adulthood really begins and I look forward to excelling in everything I do.”
But not enough students had the skills and the drive of Gabrielle. Earlier this year, Saint Louis University, the charter school’s sponsor, said Shearwater needed to institute a number of turnaround measures to improve student achievement, and it put the school on probation.
“I was comfortable with that,” Krauss said, “but the probationary language had metrics that were based on a traditional school. They weren’t growth targets. They were absolutes. If we were not going to meet them, we would be closed.
“It was an impossible task to meet those targets. They were anchored in the university’s attempt to make the case before the state for renewal of our charter, and that told you that the renewal would be couched in traditional metrics.”
The quest the school was trying to complete went through unknown territory, Krauss said.
“No one had done this yet,” she said, “and we came to believe that maybe we could. We always knew that ‘couldn’t’ was a possibility, and the way that I have come to understand this work is that we sit on the R&D side. We know this dropout issue is a pandemic in our community and so many others. So the hedged bet was that we might be able to come up with a working solution for addressing that pandemic, or we might get more intel that would get us closer to what that solution might be.”
For the students that Shearwater wanted to serve, Krauss said, a new approach was needed, one that recognizes what teens already know and gives them credit for that, rather than awarding credits for how long they have sat in class. She compared that approach with the more traditional one.
“In a high school history class, you may be judged on your classwork, your attendance, your participation,” she said. “That grade is not a reflection of your mastery of the material. It’s a reflection of your role in the classroom.”
Instead, she said, the grade should reflect what you know.
“If it took you five years,” she said, “that’s what you needed. If that took you five days, that’s what you needed.”
A new version of the ABCs
In most schools, Krauss said, students are judged by what she called the ABCs: attendance, behavior and class performance.
“What we have seen is if you have two of these, in a school like ours you can be extremely successful,” she said. “If you show up every day and are well behaved, we can work with you on the other.”
But, she added, for the students that Shearwater was trying to teach, teens whose life circumstances had interrupted their education, the system didn’t work.
“The majority of students we’ve served over the past three years were deeply deficient in all three areas,” she said. “We didn’t have the manpower or the resources to meet the variety of needs that each student presented. Our teachers in their past roles and training program had little to no formal training on dealing with trauma or dealing with crisis. So the level of need was hard to address fully, and that was to the detriment of our students.”
Another big problem, Krauss acknowledged, was the fact that too many students who ended up at Shearwater were there not because they chose to be but because they were told by a court or some other agency that they could be in school or be in a much less amenable situation, so they chose school.
Krauss described the situation this way:
“You’ve applied to Shearwater, and I see something in you and I see that Shearwater would be a great experience for you. You’re a little rough around the edges, but once you get in here you would be great. You’re in some kind of residential setting, and you have been told that a condition of transitioning out of that residential setting is that you have to be in school. You think, ‘I’ve got it. This school wants me here, and I have to be in school.’
“So a front-line worker makes an individual exception for you, and a front-line worker over here makes an individual exception for someone else. The damage comes when so many individual exceptions are made, the next time the residential situation has someone like you, they are going to send the next person and the next person and the next person. It becomes a feedback loop, which means there were parts of our school culture that were never established as firmly as they could have been.
“Maybe you got in and four weeks later something blew up and you thought, ‘I don’t need to be a part of this. They expect too much.’ Now we lose you, and there is damage to the consistency of who the student body is. Or you stay, and you’re acting up and you’re frustrated and you don’t want to be in class but have to be there and you’re sucking attention away from students who are there because they want to be there. They say, ‘This isn’t what I expected. This is like another alternative school. Why are they here?’
“We were never meant to be the panacea for all of these young people.”
What comes next?
Once graduation is over and the school year ends, Krauss will complete the work of shutting Shearwater down. She said about 95 percent of the material at the school – books, desks, the rest – has been donated, so she wants to give back. “We pull the dumpsters up and invite the community,” she said.
Financially, Krauss added, Shearwater will use its reserves to pay the costs it incurs to stop operations, so at the end of the process, it will owe nothing but have very little left.
She is looking forward to spending more time with her family, including husband Evan, who works at United Way, and sons Justice, 2 and a half, and Harrison, 3 months.
“It’s a whole confluence of things,” Krauss said. “I’m extremely excited to spend some time with my boys. This is exhausting work. There has been a high level of personal sacrifice with this work.”
But the work of the Shearwater Foundation will go on, she added, sharing what it has learned with colleagues around the country who are trying to solve the same educational dilemma.
“In the wake of our closure,” Krauss said, “there was one message from every one of them. We are Shearwater. This is our story. These are our challenges. We can’t stop, and if we stop, we won’t get the transformative results we need.”
What needs to change, she added, is a system that is designed for traditional students in a traditional school but can’t meet the needs of students who have circumstances that are anything but traditional.
“That has always come back and stymied progress for us,” Krauss said. “Even when progress was made, it would still be called into question.”
She plans to take some time off, then write about what Shearwater has accomplished and the lessons that running the school has taught, so the next time she or anyone else tries to come up with a novel approach to serve its target audience, the results can be different.
“I have been so deeply encouraged that this work can be championed out of the city of St. Louis,” Krauss said. “The response from this community in the wake of our closure has affirmed all that is good and all that is right here, an acknowledgement that the work is hard, and the reaffirmation that it has to continue. We’ve stuck to our mission and our values every moment, and nothing was pulled back in that area with our decision to close. We are still as committed to our mission and our vision as we ever were.
“Significant lessons came out of the past five years, and I feel an obligation to see those through, to evaluate and study and understand our experience, then collaborate with a large network of colleagues across the country to share experiences and make ourselves available to support them.
“Are we in the business to be a local school, or are we in the business to be disrupter and be change agents in the education of disrupted kids? If it’s the second, this model cannot work at this time in Missouri. At some time, it has to. It’s incumbent on us to take what we have learned and make that happen.”