Making changes that are making a big difference

Academies, college courses keeping high schoolers interested in learning

By Jane Manners, Globe Correspondent  |  May 8, 2005

In the two-and-a-half years since Randy Browne started his freshman year at Dorchester High, something remarkable has happened: He has started liking school.

''In ninth grade, people didn't want to come to school," says Browne, an articulate 17-year-old interested in writing and computers. ''There were kids in the hallways walking around, and fights. No one cared if you left school or not."

But this year, he says, ''school has just been a lot better. If you're not in class, the teachers actually call home to check on you. I'm really happy to be here."

Two changes at the 780-student Dorchester High are responsible for Browne's change of heart. The first is the restructuring that took place after Browne's freshman year.

With the help of a $13.6 million grant the Boston public schools received from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in July 2003, Dorchester High -- renamed Dorchester Educational Complex or DEC -- was divided into three independent ''academies," each occupying a separate floor of the building, and each with a different theme: technology, business, and public affairs.

Browne, who is enrolled in the Economics and Business Academy, recalls seeing the difference when he walked into school his first day of sophomore year: ''They'd painted the whole floor green, and each other floor had a color theme, too. It was a whole new world."

And then there are the college classes. Since the end of January, Browne has been enrolled in an introductory psychology class at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he is surrounded by college students who, as he puts it, range from 18-year-olds to people ''old enough to be my grandmother."

Browne is one of 20 DEC students who enrolled in college classes this semester, as part of a collaboration between UMass-Boston and DEC launched this past winter. While the two institutions have been affiliated through various tutoring programs for 40 years, this latest iteration of their partnership -- underwritten by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation of Quincy -- is an attempt to make the resources offered by UMass-Boston available to more DEC students.

''We have a variety of programs available to kids," says Economics and Business Academy headmaster Jack Leonard, referring to tutoring programs such as Upward Bound and GEAR UP, in which UMass-Boston undergraduates tutor DEC students. ''But it's unclear to me if the right kids are being targeted. I want to know how far we can stretch that limit. We don't want everyone fighting over the same six kids."

To eliminate what he says has sometimes been a haphazard approach to tutor assignments, Leonard and his UMass-Boston partners are working on better identifying every individual student who might benefit from a tutor.

At the same time, Leonard is pushing for average or underperforming students in his academy to get a chance at the college courses, rather than only the students with the highest grades. Browne, for instance, was a student whose high school grades, according to Leonard, haven't always ''reflected his intelligence." But his grades in Psych 100 at UMass-Boston put him in the top quarter of that class. And Browne is eager to take more classes his senior year.

''Before I started taking the class, I wasn't really doing anything after school -- just homework and being lazy," he says with a smile. ''Taking college classes really gives me a lot more confidence in my high school classes, and this exposure to college life when I'm still a junior makes me want to go to college even more. Of course I'll be back."