Remixing how its staff relates to students enabled the High School for Recording Arts to keep previously disengaged students learning even during a crisis.

As school buildings reopened this fall, much of the conversation about K-12 education focused on how best to make up for the learning opportunities students have missed out on due to COVID. But some schools, such as the High School for Recording Arts (HSRA) in St. Paul, Minnesota, maintained, and in some ways exceeded, pre-pandemic metrics of student achievement and school performance.

When we began investigating what helped this school defy the odds, we expected to find that its success had to do with its specialized, arts-based curriculum. To our surprise, however, what has stood out as most important is the school’s approach to defining the professional responsibilities of the educators who work there. Long before the pandemic, HSRA had reconceived the roles of teachers and other staff in ways that allowed the school to continue producing positive outcomes for students during a period when many schools found themselves doing worse.

We cannot pretend to be impartial researchers: Michael is the director of social impact for HSRA and Linda has been a friend of the school for years. But as people who care about the broader American education system as well, we wanted to better understand the lessons that HSRA learned in this difficult context and see whether its innovations might be of use to other schools around the country, both now and long after the pandemic is over.

The school and its staffing model

As a school whose mission is to reengage young people who have been pushed out of more traditional schools, HSRA faces some of the most challenging work in education today. The average HSRA student has been to 4.5 other schools before attending HSRA, and for many of the students, schooling has been an often traumatic experience. Then factor in the worst pandemic in over a century (and keep in mind that the murder of George Floyd occurred less than eight miles from the school and a wave of intense protests of that murder unfolded literally outside the school’s doors), and it strikes us as particularly noteworthy that HSRA was able to serve its students effectively throughout the 2020-21 year. We don’t want to suggest that it is a perfect school, but we do think that its work, especially its ability to persist through these difficult times can provide lessons that are relevant to any learning community.

HSRA was founded in 1998 when David “T.C.” Ellis, one of Minnesota’s first rap artists and protégé of the late Prince Rogers Nelson (the musician known as Prince), opened a recording studio in downtown St. Paul. Ellis soon realized that the young people showing up to his studio during school hours had more talent and tenacity than most of his paying clients. He asked why they weren’t in school and wasn’t surprised by their answers: They had been kicked out, their schools didn’t represent them, and the curriculum wasn’t relevant to their lives (Evans et al., 2020). Ellis, a product of the St. Paul Open School — a community-led alternative school created in 1971 — decided to turn his recording studio into a public charter school, with the help of his former principal who knew the ins and outs of alternative schooling. As a result, HSRA became one of the nation’s first public charter schools. Today, the school serves an average of 350 students per year from ages 14 to 21.

Rethinking roles

Under the leadership of its current executive director, Tony Simmons, HSRA has sought to sustain a school culture that is representative of its students (only 5% of whom identify as white), most notably by making it a priority to hire and retain faculty of color. But, to accomplish this in a state where only 5% of all teachers are people of color (Mahamud & Webster, 2018), the school has had to get creative. One way the school has grown its diverse staff is by hiring relatively few people who meet the traditional profile of a classroom teacher (certified to teach a specific subject area), while creating new staff positions that focus on promoting social-emotional learning, building relationships with students and their families, and providing a range of non-academic supports. Today, of the school’s 70 staff members, 55 are nontraditional educators, the majority of whom are people of color who come from the same communities as HSRA’s students.

At HSRA, all faculty are given the title facilitator of learning, though their specific roles may differ. Thus, traditional teachers (called content advisers) are just one part of a larger educator team that also includes personal advisers, case managers, and community workers. For instance, community workers focus on meeting students’ basic needs, including housing, food, and employment, and the street team (like a street team a hip-hop artist might mobilize to promote a show or a new recording) spends much of its time in local neighborhoods, working to locate potential enrollees and keep current students engaged with the school. Far from serving as truancy officers, these educators serve as advocates for students and their families, often bringing learning materials, clothes, and food to students’ homes, as well as sharing messages and encouragement from other school staff.

The school doesn’t privilege one staff function over another; instead, it defines each department as having a crucial role to play in a larger, interconnected structure. According to Joey Cienian, the education director, the work of HSRA is “not about figuring out whether students are performing in a traditional academic sense or not. . . . It’s about doing everything we can to meet the students where they’re at and bring the learning to them.” This means supporting the whole student and addressing any needs that have kept them away from school and learning. And these are tasks that can often be done best by people students can relate to and who have had similar experiences.

A hub and spoke advisory model

Many schools ask faculty to help address students’ non-academic needs, often through an advisory system in which students spend an allotted time in an assigned teacher’s classroom each week to receive additional support. In most schools that have this kind of advisory system, teachers and advisers are one and the same. What sets HSRA apart is that personal advisers and content advisers are two distinct groups. This allows content advisers to focus on academic content and skills and personal advisers to devote themselves to supporting students in everything from managing their academic loads to accessing resources for housing, counseling, health care, daycare, and employment. This doesn’t mean a strict bifurcation between roles (content advisers can talk with students about personal needs, and personal advisers can help students with academic work), but it does establish a demarcation of roles that clarifies and simplifies where each faculty member focuses their energy.

What sets HSRA apart is that personal advisers and content advisers are two distinct groups. This allows content advisers to focus on academic content and skills and personal advisers to devote themselves to supporting students.

The advisory system serves as the hub to the spokes of the school’s many services, which include state-of-the-art recording studios, a 13th-year professional certification program in the recording arts and audio/visual technologies, and connections to the school’s various wraparound services. The value of this system was on full display in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020. In response, the school hosted an internationally attended community meeting via Facebook Live that was moderated by Tiki Blackmore, one of HSRA’s lead personal advisers. When the media announced the pending verdict of Derek Chauvin — the officer who would ultimately be found guilty on all three counts of murder — the school went on high alert and established a plan for transitioning back to fully remote learning if protests broke out after the verdict was announced. The school also planned another virtual community meeting to support students and staff in processing the events as they unfolded, regardless of the outcome of the trial.

Because the school staff included faculty whose clearly defined role focused on supporting and providing resources to improve student socioemotional health, Blackmore and the rest of the advisory team could immediately respond to the moment. Her content adviser colleagues could provide relevant academic materials and continue providing their regular instruction, knowing that students were receiving the emotional support they needed. Together, both personal and content advisers are able to collaborate to provide a fully engaged, wraparound, social-emotional learning environment.

At HSRA, advisory is part of an adaptive infrastructure that isn’t seat-based, time-based, or curriculum-driven. Personal advisers’ primary responsibility is to understand what their students need and to help them create conditions under which they can thrive. This staffing model ensures that there are enough people in place throughout the school who understand students’ backgrounds and can employ culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2014) that, in turn, permeate the whole school culture. Simply put, this Black-founded, Black-operated institution centers diversity in its operations to purposefully create a culture where being Black is normalized, celebrated, and supported. Thus, a truly inclusive culture unfolds to the benefit of all.

The role of the personal adviser is, as Cienian, the education director, says:

To bring an asset-based, authentic, care-based approach to starting a conversation with a young person about their goals, needs, and living situation. HSRA calls each student — returning and new — and asks: How are you? What are you doing? What do you need? Struggling with housing? Anything? Need a gift card? Food? Then, the personal adviser empathizes, and together, they make a personal learning plan for the student. There are a lot of students who are engaged because of this opportunity to relate.

By focusing on relationships, HSRA places human needs before academic achievement, understanding that one leads to the other. This means asking students about their physical and emotional well-being before asking about homework, assignments, and test scores.

Putting these non-academic needs first does not mean that deep learning isn’t the school’s goal, but deep learning among students must be accompanied by deep knowledge of the school’s young people and community among school staff. At the same time, the school’s leaders recognize that no single educator can do everything, especially when they serve high-need students. For HRSA staff, the message is clear: “You’re primarily a teacher, an adviser, or a service provider, and we’re going to let you do that thing well.” Students’ needs get met, but no one person is expected to meet all of those needs.

Learning during a crisis

HSRA has a small crew of nine full-time content advisers certified in traditional subject areas who manage the majority of the core content. Though these instructors hold certifications in traditional subjects, content delivery occurs in an interdisciplinary fashion to meet student interests. In addition, given the student population’s high needs, the school has seven certified special educators. This averages to a teacher-student ratio of about 20 students per licensed educator, which is similar to ratios in a conventional school. However, HSRA’s combination of licensed educators and advisers reduces the ratio even further, to an average of one member of the education and engagement team for every 11 students.

Before the pandemic, this team of educators made material from their in-person learning pathways available online so that students could access it anytime and anywhere if they weren’t able to attend school on a given day. Although this gave the team valuable experience at recording and remotely providing learning experiences to students before the pandemic, only about 30% of students took advantage of this option, and engagement with online learning could not be counted as part of student attendance. During the pandemic, learning facilitators delivered content synchronously and asynchronously using the school’s pre-existing remote learning platforms. And because online learning became the primary instructional method, the school was allowed to include remote attendance in its attendance count. The year of forced remote learning led all educators to develop a deeper familiarity with the school’s remote platform. In addition, students in need of targeted learning supports were allowed to attend in person to receive tutoring, social-emotional learning supports, therapy, and outlets for their creativity.

More teachers may not be what students need most.

In many secondary schools, when teachers are absolutely stretched to the limit, they urge the administration to hire more teachers. But Renee Swanson, lead science facilitator and content adviser, recognizes that more teachers may not be what students need most: “It would be nice to have another science teacher but that won’t strengthen our school.” This became especially evident during the pandemic, and Swanson said she was “so grateful for those with caseloads who are out in the field engaging with students and getting them ready to learn.”

In 2020, the school expanded its outreach efforts and mobilized its long-standing street team to both locate potential enrollees and stay in touch with current students to re-engage them. While the street team was already engaged in this work before the pandemic, its efforts increased during the pandemic, given the more dispersed nature of the student body. Before the pandemic, the street team primarily managed students identified as houseless or highly mobile and those not in attendance who could not be reached from campus. Throughout the pandemic, this remained their mission, but the specifics of what these groups needed changed, requiring street team members to have a greater presence in the community. During the shutdown, the street team became responsible for delivering at-home kits for deeper learning; weekly food supplies; and technology such as tablets, laptops, and internet hotspots. Haben Gebreghergish, lead math facilitator, puts it this way, “Before [the pandemic] you might wait for students to come to you — and they would come. Now, knowing what students are going through, you have to go to them. That’s been a big shift.”

Dan Frey, the director of student engagement (who is responsible for tracking and interpreting student attendance, enrollment, and credit accrual data), notes that in 2019, students came to the school to enroll, and the school had to work to keep up with demand. But with the onset of the pandemic, students couldn’t come to the school and enrollment numbers went down, including among the school’s returning students. So, as the beginning of the 2020-21 school year approached, the team had to become more outward facing and proactive than ever before. Every day, Frey and his team would review the enrollment process to identify where students stood and what courses they had left to complete, and then put a plan in place to connect with them. During the pandemic, although online promotional campaigns and targeted ads helped with recruitment, word-of-mouth throughout the community remained the primary mode of recruitment and enrollment.

For Tabitha Wheeler, the lead social worker (and current Minnesota Social Worker of the Year), and Ray Womack, assistant director of student support, the pandemic brought new challenges and new opportunities for developing exactly the kinds of relationships HSRA emphasizes. Indeed, Wheeler notes that when COVID required her to interact with students online, it became easier for her to connect with certain students, especially young men who fear that they’ll be stigmatized for meeting with her. For those who worry that their peers will see and judge them for seeking help, the opportunity to meet online removes a barrier.

On the other hand, Wheeler has noticed teen pregnancies and teen parenting rising among HSRA’s student population at a time when access to childcare is even more restricted than usual. Housing challenges have also risen, which is striking at a school where, on average, 40% of students face housing challenges in a non-pandemic climate. To respond to these issues, Womack and his team work tirelessly to find students — including those without housing — and bring them laptops, Wi-Fi hotspots, at-home kits for project-based learning, food, clothes, and other crucial items, as well as offering them counseling. Womack refers to his department as “the glue” of the school, saying, “We don’t leave our students behind, regardless of their situation. If they can’t come to us, we’re going to go out and find them, show them that we care.” As he sees it, this is an example of a culturally sustaining practice.

Lessons learned

Even before the American onset of COVID-19, HSRA had been creating a learning environment designed to address the needs of its Black, brown, Indigenous, and highly mobile student population, which meant the school already had some elements in place to make a smoother transition to pandemic learning. These included not just its facility with remote learning but, more important, a personnel structure that enabled staff members to focus in on the specific needs they were best equipped to meet. The difference during the pandemic was that everyone (from the certified teachers who act as content advisers to the nontraditional teachers on the student outreach team) was prepared to go to the students.

HSRA has begun mining the culturally sustaining practices of its advisers to further develop its social-emotional learning practices throughout the school. When taken in combination with established frameworks for promoting social-emotional competency in students, the advisers’ remixed approach has evolved into the practice of certifiying advisers in non-cognitive competencies such as collaboration, effective communication, problem solving, time management, and more.

Despite the distanced nature of the past school year, HSRA was not disconnected from its students, its community, or its roots in the recording arts. In fact, the motto of the school for 2020-21 became, “Distanced, NOT Disconnected.” Simmons, the executive director, reflects on the challenge he set forth for the school at the onset of the pandemic:

Irrespective of where students are at, we now know we need to bring the learning to them, not just on campus but wherever they are in the world. We know we need to do this beyond COVID because it removes place as a necessary precondition for learning.

We believe the practices highlighted at HSRA can inspire other schools to break the familiar molds and rethink the ways they define educators’ roles and responsibilities. Rather than assuming that the familiar teacher-centered staffing model is the best and only approach, it’s time that we all reconsider the work that we do in schools and rethink who should be assigned to do what. It may take an entirely new personnel system to allow us to engage our students in ways that honor and respect their backgrounds, respond to their circumstances, and address all of their needs. HSRA has, in effect, remixed the secondary school as we know it. Isn’t it time we remix the rest of education?

Note: An earlier version of this article appeared in the Voices from the Field blog published by Education Reimagined.

References

Evans, R., Lipset, M., Ly, B., Cienian, J., & Galloway, A. (2020, September). “Nobody ever asked me why I left high school.” Let’s ask them. A qualitative study with 70 student and young people by Wilder Research and High School for Recording Arts. Amherst H. Wilder Foundation.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32 (3), 465–491.

Mahamud, F. & Webster, M.J. (2018, December). Minnesota schools struggle with widening racial gap between students and teachers. Star Tribune.

Paris, D. & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84 (1), 85-100.

This article appears in the November 2021 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 3, pp. 39-42.