July 22, 2024
Noel Crum is Assistant Superintendent for Johnson County Schools, which is located in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. In 2016, Johnson Central High School began working with BARR, one of the GRAD Partnership’s nine organizing partners, to implement a student success system.
The GRAD Partnership recently checked in with Noel to learn about what led to his school’s decision to work with BARR, and what impact that the work has had on its students.
What was the primary problem motivating your school’s student success system work?
Our primary problem at Johnson Central High School motivating the creation of our student success system was the lack of direction and focus that we witnessed from many of our students. This was particularly evident during the freshman year where we were experiencing annual failure rates of approximately 18 percent. This was coupled with a growing level of student apathy and a lack of student involvement in curricular and extracurricular activities. Also, over the past decade our region has experienced a huge economic downturn and has become one of the poorest in the nation. We realized that if we didn’t help our students achieve success and gain hope for their future, our communities may be doomed over the long run.
How did your school address this issue? And what worked best in addressing this problem?
We primarily addressed this problem by adopting the BARR (Building Assets, Reducing Risks) model. This model is tremendously effective in creating a student success system but is unique in that it is not a curriculum model and does not ask teachers to change how or what they teach. Instead, BARR is focused on two pillars: relationships and data. For us, that means helping students discover and grow their assets and strengths. It also means identifying at-risk students and addressing their needs before they fall through the cracks. We also developed a career pathways model that has every student in the high school choose a career major and pathway that includes a sequence of at least four courses to help them prepare for postsecondary success.
Can you describe the impact this has had on your students?
The impact of these efforts has been phenomenal! During the first year of implementing the BARR model, we participated in a blind research study where half of our 9th grade students were randomly selected to participate in the BARR model while the other half received no program changes. Both groups were given MAP testing as a pre- and post-assessment to measure learning. Even though BARR is not a curriculum program, the students who were randomly selected to participate in the model had significant learning gains over the students who were not selected. Also, the most impressive statistic was that the BARR students had a freshman course failure rate of only six percent while the other group had an 18 percent failure rate. We learned that helping students on an individual and personal level was the key to helping students achieve success. We also focused on adding additional pathways to help our students connect their areas of talent and interest with courses to strengthen those skills.
How has the student success system work strengthened your school as a community?
Our student success system at Johnson Central High School has tremendously strengthened our school as a community in many ways. First and foremost, we have students who are much more engaged, and our 9th grade failure rate has dropped all the way down to 1.9 percent for 2023. We credit the BARR program for this fantastic progress and for creating a positive culture in our school. Also, we have started tracking the percentage of students who are participating in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, and our rate for 9th grade has risen above 70 percent for this past school year. Finally, we are proud to report that we now offer among the most career pathways in the state of Kentucky, with 32 different choices for our students in a huge variety of areas. All of these efforts have created more pride within our school and our community. This has propelled our students to believe they can achieve on a state, national and global stage. This was evidenced by Johnson Central just earning runner-up in the 2024 International Future Problem Solving competition, competing against schools from all over the United States and numerous countries around the world.
Johnson Central High School is one of the GRAD Partnership’s spotlight schools. Spotlights are national examples of how to implement and sustain one or more of the four components of student success systems. Learn more about all our spotlights here.