"What credit recovery is about is, let's not wait until a kid has failed for two or three years in a row. We need to put that kid on a path to be successful," says Wilson, who toured the center that day, "whereas before, maybe they're hanging out with their group of friends over here and their friends say, 'Hey, let's skip period five.' They're asked to make certain choices. Here there are no distractions...the students are able to focus on their work.
"It's a school within a school," he adds.
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Pat Salas former North High School counselor, says credit recovery doesn't work like it should.
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DPS currently uses a system supplied by Apex Learning, a Seattle-based company that also produces online curricula for Advanced Placement classes nationwide. The district had 4,000 Apex "seats" this past year; one seat gives one student access to as many Apex courses as he'd like to take. District-wide statistics show that increasing numbers of high school students in all grades are signing up. As of April 22, DPS says, 3,625 students had taken credit recovery courses during the 2010-2011 year, up from about 2,400 last year and approximately 600 in fall 2008.
Graduation rates, meanwhile, have varied. Fifty percent of DPS seniors graduated in 2008. In 2009, that number jumped to 53 percent. But in 2010, it dipped slightly to 52 percent. The decrease can perhaps be attributed to a new statewide system for calculating graduation rates. Now, instead of counting all students who graduate, the state only counts students who graduate "on time," four years after they start as freshmen.
North's Engagement Center is open from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and students can attend in the daytime or the evening and learn at their own pace using online lessons. Many zip through classes more quickly than they would in the traditional classroom.
"In the Engagement Center, it's not about seat time. It's all about how quickly they're able to master the material," Wilson says. "A regular course is eighteen weeks. But here they can master it in six weeks. We tell [the] administration to make sure they're doing everything to help these students be successful. They don't waste time."
But several people familiar with last year's credit recovery program say that wasting time was the main thing students were doing.
Credit recovery "was sold as a way to meet kids where they were and to be more flexible," says Blair Brown, who taught chemistry at North for three years before leaving at the end of last year to go back to school in another state. But, she adds, "it was hastily implemented. There wasn't a lot of forethought and there wasn't a lot of afterthought. It was just a way to push people through and get them out so they wouldn't have to keep them in class."
But oftentimes, students saw credit recovery as a shortcut. "It was commonplace for them to say, 'Oh, I don't need to do well in here because I'll just go take it in credit recovery and then I will pass,'" says Brown. "Every single student who ever came in my room was capable of passing my class, given the right amount of support. It makes me really sad that there's this easy option."
Documents obtained by Westword show that as graduation approached in 2010, more and more students used that option.
During the first semester last year, 154 North students were enrolled in a total of 185 Apex courses, according to a meticulous, color-coded spreadsheet kept by the former staff member in charge of the daytime credit recovery program. The spreadsheet shows which courses students were taking and whether they'd passed. Those 154 students, it shows, only managed to pass a total of 57 classes, a rate of about 30 percent.
That number jumped dramatically in the second semester of the school year. According to the spreadsheets, 225 students were enrolled in 425 courses during the second semester — and they passed 317 of them, which put the pass rate at 75 percent.
North wouldn't permit Westword to talk to any students. But current and former staff members say they doubt all of those students passed without cheating, in part because the students didn't take the credit recovery courses seriously.
"It was very common for me to go around, and a student would have their iPod on and they'd be cruising the Internet," adds Frank Jones, a 77-year-old grandfather and volunteer at North who helped in the credit recovery lab last year for several hours a day; his granddaughter had attended North a few years ago. "I would normally say, 'The policy here is that you don't use that in the classroom.' Normally, I'd just get the one-finger salute, and there's nothing I could do about that."
But the staffer who oversaw the daytime lab did want to do something about it.
On February 10, 2010, he wrote an e-mail to Stefanie Gurule, then DPS's director of student re-engagement, who worked under Wilson. He was following up on a conversation he says they'd had a month earlier about students cheating.
"Since we talked about 4 weeks ago, students have been able to use the Internet to get more and more answers," he wrote. "If we could get a couple of websites completely blocked this would be really helpful. The students are not learning the way the program is meant to teach them."
