MORAVIA - Moravia High School has found a unique way to provide ninth grade students a successful transition from middle school to high school.

In an effort to combat rising retention rates, high school principal Brian Morgan and a group of teachers banded together two years ago to find a way to increase academic achievement and prevent students from being left behind at the end of the year. They decided to create a Ninth Grade Academy, house ninth graders all in one wing with their core teachers and offer a freshman transition course, Freshman Focus.

This year's Freshman Focus, Morgan told the Moravia Board of Education at its meeting Wednesday evening, is the best they've seen. “What we do in that course is really limitless,” he said. “Our goal in there is to get students to feel that they can be successful in high school.”

While all students take the course, Freshman Focus is used primarily for students needing Academic Intervention Services in English and math. For students not needing AIS, Morgan said, they receive classroom time to work on academic projects such as research projects.

The teachers place an emphasis on MLA research papers, career exploration and goal setting.

Between the years 2002 and 2005, Morgan said, the high school had a 14 percent retention rate for ninth graders with 51 percent failing at least one or more classes per marking period.

The first year the high school offered Freshman Focus, the retention rate dropped to just 2 percent. While last year's rate increased to 4 percent, the class size was larger than the year before, Morgan said.

Over the summer, the teachers involved - Shannon Dann, school counselor; Peg Dienhoffer, social studies; Eileen Epstein, living environment; Lisa Hares, mathematics; Richard Leise, English; Brian Mazza, living environment - sat down and discussed changes to the program to make it even more successful.

What they changed, Morgan said, was how these teachers worked together to better the course.

“The people working in the Academy have found it so beneficial to them to be able to talk about common students,” he said. “Often in the high schools you go down a wing - the math wing, the English wing - people who have content in common but they don't have students in common. So they may talk about the discipline they teach, but they are not talking about working with certain kids.

“Because of their proximity to one another, and because we meet on a regular basis, because we communicate so much with each other we are able to borrow from each other, steal from each other, if you will, what works to help student A in your room when I may not be reaching student B in my room and how can we share them,” he added. “And they trade kids back and forth through Freshman Focus to find out who it is who has a connection with that student and that is how I think we have been so successful with our students.”

Staff writer Alyssa Sunkin can be reached at alyssa.sunkin@lee.net or 253-5311 ext. 239.