COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL NOVEMBER 8, 2017 7A
Kennedy Continued from A1
in a national education system that ranks students by
tests scores and pays schools a dollar amount per head.
In Cottage Grove, it’s $143 per student, per day.
The start
There are 81 alternative high schools in the state of
Oregon.
Kennedy joined their ranks after Al Kennedy saw his
former students playing a knife game outside a class
they were supposed to be in. The kids had been part of
the Cottage Grove High School’s forestry program, led
by Kennedy, before it was cut from the curriculum. “…
All of the redneck kids in Cottage Grove took forest-
ry,” Kennedy, a teacher of 45 years, said. “So, I had
the badass boys and then they canceled forestry and I
watched my badass boys go into traditional programs
and stink them up and disrupt them because they were
confrontational and ornery,” he said.
Kennedy approached the administration.
He was given a classroom and all of the “bad” kids.
Since then, Kennedy has seen the program grow from
a classroom of students, to being recognized as a
school and to now having their own campus. “I drove
the model-T and they are in a Cadillac,” he says of the
transformation.
“In alternative school the rule is: you pursue your
passion and I’ll turn it into math, science and social
studies…Like a kid comes up and says, I’m into tattoo-
ing. I said, that’s great. I want a report on the history of
tattooing next week,” he said. “At a traditional school
it is more like being in the marching band and you’ve
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got to stay in step and play your instrument at the same
time. At alternative school it’s not like being in a band,
it’s like taking private music lessons,” he said.
While ideologies and teaching methods between Ken-
nedy and the traditional Cottage Grove High School are
easily compared, the signifi cance of statistics on stu-
dent performance is more diffi cult to pin down.
Kennedy’s four-year graduation rate for the 2015-2016
school year was 16.67 percent. Cottage Grove High
School’s was 93.62 percent—second in the state of
Oregon.
“When I look at these statistics, I compare them to oth-
er alternative high schools,” said South Lane Superin-
tendent Krista Parent. “We’re having kids fi nish. Many
of them dropped out and we got them back by offering
Kennedy. If it had not been for Kennedy, they would
have been high school drop outs with an eighth or ninth
grade education,” she said.
Parent also noted the nature of Kennedy, stating that
students often arrive there with large educational gaps.
The school’s fi ve-year graduation rate for the same
time period in 2015-2016 was 26.87 percent; more than
a 10 percentage point jump.
“When you look at the Cottage Grove High School
graduation rate for the last three years, it’s been in the
top three in the state. But, if not for Kennedy, those
kids would have dropped out and counted as drop outs
for Cottage Grove High School’s drop-out rate,” Parent
said. The 2015-2016 drop-out rate for Cottage Grove
High School is less than one percent. Kennedy’s was
19.8 percent.
Ketcher acknowledges that the goal is to send kids to
college, but that may not be feasible for every Kennedy
student.
They face poverty, (25 percent of the students attending
Kennedy are considered homeless under the McKin-
ney-Vento Act and one-third of the district's homeless
population attends the school), teen pregnancy, unsta-
ble home lives and learning disabilities but Kennedy
has become more than a statistic. The reasons students
fi nd themselves there are varied and weighted by each
individual student’s passions, progress and personal
struggles.
One of them
And there is no teacher or administrator more familiar
with what the students are going through than Ketcher.
One of four kids, Ketcher grew up on a farm in Minne-
sota with a family that did not have money and did not
put an emphasis on education. Her mom dropped out
of school the fi rst week of freshman year in high school
and her dad, in the fi rst week of his sophomore year.
And so, when Ketcher walked into kindergarten on
the fi rst day she did not know any of the letters in the
alphabet. She didn’t begin reading until she was in the
third grade.
“I was in Special Ed not because I had a learning
disability but because I was a product of poverty,” she
said.
But in fi fth grade when a teacher spent extra time
working with her, her outlook changed.
“I had a teacher that stayed after school with me every
day and read with me and cheered me up. And when
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I would cry she would be like, ‘I’m not going to take
that, you’re going to wipe those tears away and we’re
going to read this book and we’re going to do it right
now,’” she said.
It was then that Ketcher decided she was going to be a
teacher.
With her family living paycheck to paycheck, Ketcher
earned straight A’s in high school, was on the cheer
team, worked 30 hours a week and was excited and
ready to go to college.
“My mom thought that going to college was the dumb-
est thing I could ever do. She thought, why would you
pay money to go to school. I would have paid money to
get out of school,” she said.
Ketcher got her degree at Arizona State and on gradua-
tion day, was offered a teaching job.
Of her 23 cousins, she is the only one to go to college
but then, and now, Ketcher believes in the power of
education. She believes that it offers students a way
forward and that it can provide a path to success. And it
is why she chose Kennedy.
“This is what took me out of the loop of poverty and so
I hope that kids will grasp onto that,” said Ketcher.
“These kids are me.”
And they know that. On a sunny day in September, a
student walked into Kennedy’s main offi ce—a modular
on the back half of campus manned by Jolie Presley
with an offi ce for Ketcher that has a separate entrance,
often utilized by students, slipping by Presley--with a
problem. He needed to log into a computer program
and was hoping for some guidance from Ketcher. He
got it. Like an older sister who gives a shove, a laugh
and soothes the sting with a pat on the back, she told
him to hurry along in his work. He was too close to
graduation to drag his feet.
“He has like, three projects left that he can easily
fi nish,” she said later. A handful of projects between
a student and graduation is a cause for celebration for
alternative school instructors but for students, it’s often
more daunting. “They like it here, it’s comfortable
and graduation means leaving,” she said, noting that
the future isn’t always mapped out for students by the
time they are closing in on the end of their high school
career.
Cottage Grove’s economy revolves largely around the
school district itself. It’s the largest employer in town
with Weyerhaeuser—the local lumber mill, coming in
a close second. Salaried jobs are few and far between
while hourly positions in the retail and service industry
are mostly occupied—often by individuals a decade
or more removed from high school. The closest city,
Eugene, offers more opportunity but is 20 minutes
north on the highway and is home to the University of
Oregon which churns out interns, willing entry-level
workers and comes with a $3,224 per term price tag.
How it Works
When each student fi rst gets to Kennedy, they meet
with Ketcher to talk about why they are there and to
fi gure out what program they should be placed in. The
94 students at Kennedy are divided into three distinct
programs: Odysseyware, the cohorts and the General
Education Development (GED) program.
Odysseyware is where students will likely fi rst end up.
The fi ve day a week, half-day program has 15 students
in the morning and 15 students in the afternoon. It is a
computer-based classroom that has students who are
credit-defi cient, start work on their own as they begin
the process of catching up to where they need to be in
school.
“Odysseyware is a perfect opportunity for kiddos who
have anxiety,” said Ketcher. “However, Odysseyware
isn’t a program where you earn a ton of credit so it is
not a long-term solution. It’s just temporary until they
feel comfortable to move into the cohort.”
The cohort model most closely resembles the tradi-
tional high school model. There are three cohorts with
about 15 students each, primarily made up of juniors
and seniors, that go to
their three core classes of
math, science and English
for an hour and a half four
days a week for the entire-
ty of the year.
Cohort students also par-
ticipate in Spark programs
– which resemble elec-
tives and are an hour each
day – throughout each
term. The Spark programs
cover a range of topics
that students are interest-
ed in and they get to help
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shape the curriculum for
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the coming weeks. The
Sparks that are currently
being taught are focused
on storytelling, music,
martial arts, green liv-
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ing and arts and crafts.
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