ADELLA HARDING Elko Daily Correspondent
ELKO – As the school year wraps up, the students and teachers participating in the Star Academy program that started at Adobe Middle School in the fall are giving the new program their vote of approval. Star Academy is helping eighth graders at Adobe improve their grades, boost school attendance and build their self-esteem.
Students especially liked the extra help from teachers in the smaller classes.
Adobe Middle School Star Academy student Yanessa Robles
“I like how the learning is more hands-on, and I like the smaller classes,” said student Yanessa Robles, who said she feels more confident than she did before attending the Star Academy.
Student Emily Garcia, who plans to be a radiologist, said she also liked the smaller classes, and she liked the teachers.
Classes for those at the academy have a maximum of 20 students, and math, science, English and social studies classes are 90 minutes long, rather than the shorter classes for those seventh and eighth grade students not part of the Star Academy.
“I like how the classes are more interactive, and the teachers help us more,” said student Shawn Palima. Student Junior Corona, who plans to go to college and play baseball, agreed with the other three students who spent some time talking about the academy.
“It’s a lot less stressful,” said Corona on the last day of April, just weeks before school ends for the summer and the Star students become high schoolers.
Eighth graders in the Star Academy at Adobe Middle School in Elko study in the social studies classroom. From left are Shawn Palima, Junior Corona, teacher Kenneth Maderis, Emily Garcia and Yanessa Robles. | Adella Harding
Star Academy teachers like the academy, too. Kenneth Maderis, who teaches social studies, said he likes the academy “a lot.”
“I like the smaller classes. We can work with struggling students and do more hands-on projects,” said math teacher James Brawley. “I like the fact that it is not just lecturing.”
The academy’s English teacher, Savannah Flores, said “there a lot of opportunities for students” to learn one-on-one with teachers.
She said the academy “is about understanding, not just getting the right answer.”
Gathered around a table in a Star Academy classroom at Adobe Middle School are, from left, teachers Savannah Flores, English; Kenneth Maderis, social studies; James Brawley, math; and Tai Costa, science. | Adobe Middle School
Tai Costa is the science teacher, and said much of science instruction is online, but the students have opportunities for experiments. For example, there are stations where students can create their own weather.
“It is very hands-on,” she said. “The kids make us better teachers.”
A console which Adobe Middle School Star Academy students use to study the weather. | Adobe Middle School
This is the first Star Academy in the Elko County School District and the first in the West. The Elko County School Board approved spending $1.05 million over three years for the Star Academy. The money came from a Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation grant.
The Star Academy is designed to help at-risk students, and new data shows success.
According to the figures from Star, A-B rates in English climbed from 10% in the first semester to 19% in the second semester for a 90% increase in top-tier performance, while top grades in math jumped from 14.4% to 41.3%, for a 186.6% gain from the beginning semester to well into the second semester.
For science courses, A-B percentages rose from 4.9% to 13.7%, a 179.6% improvement in high- achieving grades, and social studies had only a 1% A-B rate at the beginning, and that rose to 6.2%, or up 520%, according to the data.
In the first semester 80% of students had a passing rate for all courses, and 87% had a passing rate for all courses in the second quarter.
Figures also show a 42% decrease in flagged behavior incidents between the first and second semesters, and attendance climbed from 70% in the first semester to 92% in the second semester.
“Semester 2 reflects much stronger student engagement, with noticeably fewer absences and more instructional time recovered,” the report states.
As part of the package, NOLA Education LLC out of New Orleans provided furniture, equipment, technology and the curriculum for Adobe and the company installed everything. NOLA also provided professional development workshops on site before the school year began.
A Star representative comes to Adobe once a month, and there is online tech support every day.
The Star Academy program started at Adobe Middle School in the fall. | Adella Harding
Jennifer Gohl, assistant principal at Adobe, said that when the current school year first started last August “some kids were not coming to school at all,” so the academy’s first victory was “just having them here, and then we could work on academics.”
She said the students in the first year of the academy were “kids who fly under the radar,” but already there are other parents requesting that their students be in the Star Academy in the next school year. The maximum student capacity is 80.
“The curriculum is different,” Gohl said, and the teachers confirmed that they have different textbooks for the academy than the rest of the study body uses.
According to Star Academy’s website, the academy is a proven “school-within-a-school” program for students who have become disengaged and fallen behind. It uses a hands-on, project-based, STEM-inspired model to re-engage learners, advancing them up to two grade levels in a single year.
Including academy students and sixth graders who come to Adobe for math, there are just under 700 students at Adobe, Gohl reported.
Students also learn about potential careers, such as crime scene investigation, and they can take one elective course outside the academy, including physical education, art, yearbook and robotics.
Emily Garcia and Yanessa Robles said they are taking yearbooks. Both of them, along with Shawn Palima and Junior Corona, said they would recommend Star Academy to others. They also were student advocates talking to parents at an April event.
Star Academy students explore over 50 career paths as they work through focused modules that align with their academic and job skill objectives. They’re exposed to nearly 100 more during their active, hands-on lessons, the Adobe Middle School website on the academy states.
A map showing some of the success stories from Star Academies at schools around the country. | NOLA Education
Star Academy is the product of New Orleans-based NOLA Education, but the program’s history goes back to 2004, when a team of education experts and researchers in South Carolina designed a program to advance students who were held back at least one year, re-engage them in their learning, expose them to career options, and improve attendance, discipline and social skills, the Star website states.