What started as a geometry project is changing the lives of kids in Boone County Schools and reshaping the educational approach for leaders in the district.
To start the 2015 school year, Vice Principal Joe Hibbett and Director of Innovative programs Jerry Gels encouraged teachers to try project-based learning, and early results showed promise.
Hibbett and Gels work with the Boone County Alternative Center for Education.
Gels recalls, “After discouraging a tiny house project, I shared this goofy dream I have of building a village of crooked playhouses for a Christmas display. The next morning math teacher Andrew Brown and Hibbett, came to me with a series of geometry lesson plans and the schematics for a crooked playhouse.” He continued, “I kind of wanted to tell them I was kidding but I could tell there would be no stopping them.”
Over the course of next few days students would start designing and budgeting for the houses they were designing. Brown would go on to rally the staff and kids and by April his students completed 9 houses and a 15-foot tower.
Then Stephanie Haggerty, principal of Camp Ernst, heard that after each build students looked for ways to improve them, including making them wheel chair accessible.
She approached the team about building one for her terminally ill niece and six siblings.
“Mr. Brown, Mr. Hibbett, and the students jumped at the opportunity, said Gels. “What was incredible was the project was started in the summer. Kids came in regularly to work on it in June and July.”
As the educators reviewed their data this summer, they made some eye-opening discoveries about the project-based learning projects.
Four years ago there were 197 suspensions but only about 90 students were at the center. By April 2016 the team was working with 210 students and no child was suspended from January to April.
Students who previously missed 30-80 days of school were there every day and staying well past 6 p.m.
All students were progressing to the next grade level. Students who wouldn’t work together before were accomplishing things together. Seventy students, most former dropouts, would go on to get diplomas. From this experience the district encouraged the team to grow and build new programs.
“This year we have an entire school dedicated to Project Based Learning and we started another program called the Homebuilders program,” said Hibbett.
The newest playhouse — two stories tall and being retrofitted for the special needs child — can been seen at the Old Florence Firehouse, the new robotics center for BCS schools. Students are continuing to work on it. It will be delivered October 11.
“We couldn’t be more excited about what’s happening, and to think it really started with building that first playhouse,” said Hibbett.
From Boone County schools