One word used frequently in the same sentence with Beach High School is “historic.”
It’s historic in that it was one of the nation’s first public high schools for African-Americans.
It’s historic in that it has produced an ongoing string of doctors, lawyers, mayors and business leaders during its 146-year history.
And it’s historic in what it has meant as a symbol of practical and intellectual success to a significant portion of Savannah’s community.
Unfortunately, in recent years it has become a negative symbol of the failure of academics, of ongoing campus tension and occasional chaos and of well intended but unsuccessful improvement efforts. Then, about three years ago, things began to change for the better.
At the core of what has become a remarkable turnaround are focus, dynamic leadership and a radical education reform grant from President Barack Obama’s administration.
Charles Brown, who enrolled as a freshman four years ago, was part of the evolution — or maybe it was more of a revolution.
“Everything changed my sophomore year … We hit the ground running like nothing could stop us,” he said.
Before 2010, Beach had been a source of frustration not only to its students but to faculty and administrators who had struggled to find ways to boost test scores and promote overall academic improvement.
Despite their efforts, Beach remained trapped on the federally mandated No Child Left Behind Act Needs Improvement List. Superintendent of Schools Thomas Lockamy had installed a handpicked principal who was able to get Beach close to its goals but never quit there.
“I’ll never forget,” Lockamy said. “I met with the Beach High student government and they asked me, ‘Why are you allowing our school to fail? We want a good reputation, and we need your help.’”
In the aftermath, Lockamy gathered the faculty into groups one day in 2009 and told them he had a plan for pulling Beach out of its academic swamp.
Beach would be among the first schools in the nation to receive a three-year, $6 million Obama administration grant to turn around academic outcomes. Beach would get resources for research-based teaching methods. Teachers would receive intensive training and even bonuses for sticking with Beach High and meeting goals.
Under the rules of the turnaround grant, however, Beach High School would have to clean house. At least half of the faculty and staff would have to be replaced.
The basic tenets of the plan were simple — create an atmosphere where enthusiastic and optimistic faculty receive the support, training and data they need to keep students excited about achievement.
To make it work, Lockamy turned to Derrick Muhammad, who had achieved success as principal of Johnson High and at the Woodville-Tompkins Career and Technical Education Training Center.
When Muhammad took over, he rehired just 13 members of the previous faculty. To gain the trust and support of a skeptical student body, he was candid in telling them where they stood.
He told them where they were academically and where they needed to be when the turnaround money ran out.
“I just laid it out there for them to see. … This was our last opportunity to turn things around, and we had to do it fast,” he said.
At the end of Muhammad’s first year and for the first time in the history of the No Child Left Behind Act, Beach High School passed enough Georgia high school graduation tests and graduated enough students to make adequate yearly progress.
As Beach began its second year under the turnaround grant, Georgia had changed its standards for academic progress.
State education officials began looking at end-of-course test scores instead of measuring progress by outcomes on graduation tests.
That meant Beach had to raise the bar on academic outcomes in every subject area on every grade level.
Classroom instruction was closely monitored; teachers worked with teacher coaches and received regular feedback on improving effectiveness. Students took weekly benchmark tests and were grouped by areas of academic need.
The result was record success.
Math II end-of-course test pass rates were above the state average. Economics and U.S. history pass rates were above the district average. Beach was the only local high school to improve its pass rates on all nine end-of-course tests administered that year.
In the final year of the grant, academic benchmarks didn’t get easier, but the students and faculty made it work.
It was the year Georgia implemented its academic progress system, called the Georgia College and Career Ready Performance Index. Schools were issued scores for 2012 based on end-of-course test scores and a new, less forgiving method for calculating graduation rates.
Getting freshmen to graduation day in four years had never been easy for Beach, yet Beach earned the maximum points for closing the achievement gap, exceeded the state average for Georgia’s other turnaround and transformation grant schools and was just shy of the state’s overall average of 72.6.
Only three years earlier, Beach had been in Georgia’s bottom 10 percent. Now, Muhammad expects the school’s 2013 score to be even better.
“We could have had more students passing AP exams and scoring higher on the SAT,” he said. “We left some points on the table. That won’t happen again.”
The efforts by Beach have been recognized by the National Conference for Education of Black Children, the National Institute for School Turnaround, the Georgia Department of Education Race to the Top office and the Georgia Department of Education Office of School Improvement.
When Travaris Holmes moved from Windsor Forest High to Beach for his sophomore year, he didn’t believe reports about Beach High’s progress.
“I had no idea school could be this good,” he said. “When I came here, I had never traveled out of Georgia. Last week, I went to an academic conference in Chicago. It makes me think there are so many more things I can do because there is so much more out there for me.”
That’s what it’s all about. Now, the challenge is for the school system to replicate Beach’s success throughout the district.
