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A powerful education reform movement sweeping the nation has hit Berkeley High School, and now parents are being invited to join the discussion.  

The Berkeley Unified School District has more than $100,000 to study how small learning communities might help solve pressing problems at Berkeley High like campus violence, poor attendance and high teacher turnover. 

The first in a series of Community Workshops to study small learning communities and their potential at Berkeley High has been scheduled for 10 a.m., May 19, at Berkeley Alternative High School, 2701 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

“Anyone who has a kid they’re considering sending to Berkeley High, they should be coming,” said Joan Blades, a parent activist whose volunteered to help with the small learning communities planning process. “The greatest success with this kind of transitions are the ones that have strong grassroots support, and that’s what we need to provide.” 

The federal government set aside $45 million in the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings to create smaller, more personal learning communities in some of the biggest high schools in the United States. This was done by either creating schools-within-a-school with specialized curriculums or by simply restructuring the school day. 

Education research, said supporters of the Small Learning Communities program, shows that communities of less than 600 students are simply less likely to develop many of the problems that plague U.S. high schools today, from violence to achievement gaps between students of different ethnicities. 

Nearly half of U.S. high school students today attend schools of more than 1,500 students, according to Small Learning Communities program literature. 

“Research ultimately confirms what parents intuitively believe: That smaller schools are safer and more productive because students feel less alienated, more nurtured and more connected to caring adults, and teachers feel that they have more opportunity to get to know and support their students,” said one report on the program. 

(For an extensive bibliography of small schools research, visit the Small Schools Workshop at www.smallschoolsworkshop.org/info3.html.) 

Of the $45 million in grants made in the Small Learning Communities program’s first year, more than $10 million went to the state of California. The Los Angeles Unified School District alone received seven grants, one less than the entire state of Texas. And Congress has set aside $125 million to be awarded for small learning community efforts at the end of 2001 – an increase of 277 percent over this year’s appropriation. 

The Berkeley Unified School District was one of 19 California school districts to received a Small Learning Communities planning grant this year. The district has received two matching grants on top of the $47,000 federal grant, Blades said, bringing the total to $141,000. 

Blades said the money will be used to educate parents and train teachers, in some cases by sending them to see how other schools have implemented small learning communities. 

Tim Greco, an education programs consultant for the California Department of Education, said one of the reasons California schools applied so heavily for the Small Learning Communities grants is that the program gives local school districts a great deal of latitude to decide how to reduce school size. 

As opposed to pulling something off the shelf and trying to replicate it, the grant recipients are expected to come up with their own model based on what would be practical and effective for their community, Greco said. 

In the case of Berkeley High, one of the challenges will be to maintain the school’s current strengths — test scores consistently place it among the best high schools in the state — while finding ways to better serve underperforming students, Blades said. 

Grade estimates 15 weeks into the fall semester this year indicated that as many as 242 Berkeley High freshman were failing two or more classes. 

“Berkeley High is a complex entity,” Blades said. “I don’t pretend to have expertise in that area. But I have read the literature about small schools. And you just think, ‘yeah, these kids need to have a real connection with the people who are teaching them and a real connection with each other.’”  

If the community rallies behind a single model for small learning communities in the coming months, the Berkeley school district could apply to the Small Learning Community program for an implementation grant in October. The Oakland Unified School District received a $1.5 million grant from the program this year to implement its own model for more personalized education, which consists of breaking five high schools that serve 10,405 students into as many as 20 small autonomous schools.