St. Paul school sees payoff putting students in charge

The last weeks of senior year might be tune-out time for some students. But it was anything but for 20-some seniors at Johnson High School who gathered recently in a classroom to talk strategy.

Perched on desks and huddled around laptops, they were planning lessons and games for Johnson's 15-minute daily advisory classes. Johnson added the advisories this year as part of an effort to shift some control at the school to students.

Three-hundred or so Johnson upperclassmen team up to teach the classes, and these seniors plan content, which include team-building activities, behavior lessons and homework help."

Senior Veeva Lee said she's even helped her peers resolve an argument.

"Out of class and out of school they would get pretty into it, and they would argue and stuff," she said. "We just took a step back — 'Remember we're a community, and we're a whole and we have to work together to solve a problem.'"

Arguments like that can easily spiral into the discipline problems that have troubled schools in St. Paul and elsewhere this year. But Johnson Principal Micheal Thompson says when students get more control at school, they also take on more responsibility for creating a calm environment. Students now serve on Johnson's hiring committees and recently helped craft a change in school grading policy.

Every St. Paul school has its own approach to leadership. Some pair freshmen with upperclassmen mentors or have students lead assemblies. But the district says no other schools use Johnson's advisory model. It's one of a number of new strategies in St. Paul: Johnson and five other schools will also pilot restorative justice programs next year, and the new teachers' contract calls for increased support staff at district schools.

Life at Johnson is not perfect under the new model. The school had fights this year and in one incident in March a student hit a teacher.

Thompson, though, said he's seen small discipline improvements. Some students have seen it, too.

I'm not going to say everybody gets along, because not everybody's going to be best friends," said senior Britney Roberts. "But seniors get to interact with underclassmen, and underclassmen can trust seniors. It gets better."

Giving students more say in how the school is governed gets them working on the same team with adults, said Rob Horner, who leads a federally funded national resource center for behavior.

"They're looking for exactly what we as adults keep saying we want from them," he said. "But they don't want to just be told, 'This is the way you do it.' They want to be encouraged to be part of the solution."

Thompson hopes for more change with time.

"We don't have any illusions of reaching 100 percent of students with this," he said. "We've got to get to a critical mass so that the expectations of the building are set by the students in the building and not simply imposed by the adults."

Thompson says while he works on that culture change, he's seeing other encouraging signs. Rates of freshmen on Johnson's honor roll hit a 15-year high this year and he notes freshman year success is key to boosting graduation rates.

In the last weeks of her senior year, Sade Allison said her new responsibilities changed her attitude toward younger peers.

"For me, I was like the upperclassmen didn't help us, why we got to help them?" she said. "But we've got to change, so I'm more willing."

Next school year, upperclassmen will meet freshman at the door on the first day of school and supervise orientation to show the new students how it's done at Johnson.