With her first year on the job behind her, Fort Lupton High School Principal Alice Sueltenfuss’ enthusiasm hasn’t waned a bit. After the rigors of a year at the helm, you might expect her to take some down time to recoup, gather her energy and start fresh in September. Rather, she’s planning big things for the fall, when the students again crowd the hallways.
A big push will be on ownership, as in a student owning their destiny and the steps required to achieve it. Directly related to that is targeting specific academic paths toward a student’s goals and needs, while creating a portfolio for post-secondary education applications and admission in either college or technical schools.
“That is the big one,” Sueltenfuss said. “Our social studies department will embrace the post-secondary and help every student know what they want to be ready for. They don’t have to know exactly what they want to do, but they will be ready for just about anything they put down as a plan. There is this total ownership in information building, so that when a student leaves Fort Lupton High School, they really were an active member in planning for after high school.”
Along with that ownership comes a sense of belonging, something Sueltenfuss’ administration promotes in a big way at school and in the student’s homes.
“School pride has been accelerated 100 percent this year,” Sueltenfuss said. “In our climate survey this year in the district for the high school, the parents in the community spoke and rated highly, our school climate.”
That school spirit translates into a culture where students feel respected and, in turn, respect their peers in a community setting, lending a cooperative effort to assemblies.
“Every event we have had has gone off without a glitch, no student interruptions, no inappropriate behaviors,” Sueltenfuss said. “I know some bigger schools like the schools in Brighton can’t even have assemblies any more, and we are still small enough and the kids are still excited enough to listen to each other that we can pull these things off without a single mishap.”
With the school Hispanic population currently running near 70 percent, language barriers are an ever-present challenge for the district and the high school. To that end, one of the qualifications for new teachers coming on board is a strong working knowledge of AVID strategies.
“We are at 68 percent Hispanic, and probably 40 percent English language learners. Another 40 percent of our parents are monolingual. That means we really have to be sensitive to the communication needs of those parents between the school.”
In support of that goal, the school now has an attendance person working in the capacity of community liaison.
“That person acts as the community link between the school and the parents, who might not understand the mechanics of the high school system,” Sueltenfuss said.
Positive reinforcement being the watchword, Sueltenfuss took to some novel approaches in the past year to celebrate successes in the student body. Paging through a 2012 yearbook, Sueltenfuss noted a strong focus on family involvement throughout the pages, a common theme in Fort Lupton High School.
“We have brothers and siblings that go to our school, and it made me realize that we have a lot of families that struggle, or are in crisis. But all of these families found success either through an activity such as drama, or MESA or DECA or FBLA, or they found it in athletics, along with academic achievement,” Sueltenfuss explained. “So this past year, we celebrated kids with four award assemblies. GPA awards, attendance awards, core curricula awards were all given to the students.”
Sueltenfuss also took to recognizing student achievement over the public address system during daily announcements, further lending an air of accomplishment and positive reinforcement to the students.
“I think kids like to be recognized as individuals and not just students,” Sueltenfuss explained. “They want you to know a little something about them, and I think every individual is like that.”
Bumping up the focus on the Advancement Via Individual Determination program, (2011-2012 was the first year an AVID class inhabited all four grades) Sueltenfuss is looking toward the teachers in all core disciplines to help the students keep on track and organized.
“My plan for next year is that all core curricular classes will use AVID notebooks. Students will keep an interactive notebook and use Cornell note taking skills in every one of their classes so our students can have consistency.”
One area the school still needs positive growth in is mathematics, admittedly one of the weaker links in student achievement at FLHS. Sueltenfuss is working that as well.
“What we did to be proactive is we bought a new curriculum that we think is much more structured for our students, for this coming fall,” Sueltenfuss. “Our math scores will reflect very low scores on the TCAP. We already know that, and we have to find a way to help kids be successful at math at a high school level.”
Also planned are honors level classes for math, and honors, speech and creative writing choices in the language arts department.
“Maybe we were shooting ourselves in the foot indirectly in math,” Sueltenfuss explained. “Maybe we had some kids that were being held back. If we can get those honors-level kids moving on, then we could have smaller classes for the kids who really need help.”
Those class size reductions are at the core of Sueltenfuss’ personal philosophy on the educational process.
“I am an interventionist, and I believe if you take a smaller group of kids and work with them, you will have positive outcomes,” Sueltenfuss said. “So we will see how that goes.”
Contact Staff Writer Gene Sears at gsears@metrowestnewspapers.com