“But only if the student is from Metro.”

Metro’s approach to community partnerships is decidedly different from the route high schools have traditionally taken. Rather than treating internships as something that companies may want to do as an act community goodwill, Metro aggressively seeks out ways that its STEM curriculum can provide something of concrete value to businesses and organizations that are willing to mentor its students.

Over the course of his trimester-long internship, Metro student Matthew Peterman spent time at 3X testing their data appliances. He even created a new way to test them more rigorously to ensure their quality, which the company plans to continue to use.

Peterman also researched and rated multiple software options that the small company will use to improve its system for customer support. He also explored and tested the best software environments for the company to begin to develop a Macintosh platform.

“I really enjoyed working in the smaller, relaxed environment,” Peterman told the group at his internship exhibition, as he considered what size and type of workplace he’d like to work in eventually. “I got to see all parts of the company. It’s sort of nice to have the CEO two desks over so you’re all working together as a team.”

Then, perhaps most importantly: “I’m prepared to see how little I know, how much knowledge I still have to gain,” she says to a group that includes Metro staff, outside community members, family and fellow students at her senior gateway. “I’m prepared to give, display and live up to the name Metro Early College.”

Unlike the Gateway ceremony that students generally undergo at the end of their second year to determine their readiness to take college courses, senior gateways give students an opportunity to look back and teach their teachers about what worked for them.

“In the senior gateway, the student can show us the 35,000-foot view of their time at Metro,” teacher Neal Bluel tells the gathered group. “The can help us understand what is going to help them be successful when they move beyond Metro’s walls.”

Through an iMovie featuring images of friends and educational experiences from her past four years, a PowerPoint presentation assessing her growth at Metro and a testimony from a fellow student advocate, King depicts herself as a strong communicator and a person more interested in ethical contributions to the world than personal economic gain.

Throughout the Metro experience, students examine their growth through the filter of the six “Metro habits of heart and mind.” Each self-assessment asks them to evaluate their abilities as an effective communicator, inquiring learner, active and responsible decision maker, effective collaborator, critical thinker and engaged learner.

To King, it’s her growth as both an effective collaborator and communicator that she feels will push her forward, having completed assignments like a collaborative writing project with her mother about a near-death car accident. She also represented Metro in a promotional video for Ohio State that was shown to contributors.
Three years earlier, she also raised her own funds with another student to visit Cambodia and interview Kmher people.

“I saw the reality of people there,” she said. “What girls had to do to bring home money… people who get blonde highlights in their hair because of malnutrition… the extremely high HIV-positive population.”

And in spite of those things, what she found when she interviewed people was that there was still a lot of hope, she told the room, getting slightly choked up.

Once King’s presentation is complete, the group poses questions to her, like “what was the most difficult thing that didn’t go the way you planned, from which you thought you learned the most?”

Because of the mastery system, King, who scored an 85 in Spanish, discussed having to retake the course, which, she said, was hard, but may have made her more fluent in the language.

King and all other students are dismissed from the room to discuss whether or not her presentation suggests that she is truly college-ready. Everyone agrees that she is as they discuss the things that impressed them, or that they felt might be helpful to her going forward. She is called back into the room, and Bluel gives her feedback.

“We thought it was extremely compassionate, you showed it and didn’t list it as an attibute,” he tells her, scanning notes he made. “In your demeanor, you seem to be very flexible, and that flexibility is going to take you a long, long way. The emotional reaction you were having seemed to catch you off guard, but after that, your presentation was more natural.”

“We all agree that you have passed your senior gateway.”

Over the course of several months last school year, Jeff Elliott’s advisory periodically stepped away from its usual business, like talking over concerns about mastering classes, getting through the Gateway or coping with the stresses of early college work. Instead, the group debated the finer points of what an effective student government should look like in hopes that establishing one for Metro would lead to greater student involvement in the town meeting and the overall quality of the school. They researched what, within Metro’s structure and bylaws, they could truly hope to influence or change.

After a preliminary presentation at the winter town meeting, the group came back together to discuss the finalized framework of the Metro Council before presenting it to the student body.

“I wanted to honor you guys and congratulate you and offer yourselves a round of applause,” Elliott tells his students.

Under the structure the group designed, students bring issues to representatives in advisory, and those representatives bring them to the larger weekly council meetings. After lengthy discussions about whether it’s better to have the same representatives from each school advisory all year long, or to change those representatives regularly, the architects of the plan have decided on rotating representation. They want an effective and influential student government, not a group of “popularity contest winners.”

There are concerns that the student body may reject the entire proposal. If that happens, Elliott assures them, the months of time and consideration they have put into planning will not have been in vain. They will receive service learning credit and hand off lessons learned to any other advisory that might be willing to take up the charge of refining a structure for student input. It’s time for this group of students to get back to the usual business of advisory.

Staff members shared with Elliott that they think that it might be important to provide one staff member on the council for continuity. He explains that to his advisory, but they like the plan as it stands.

“This plan has got holes big enough to drive a Mack Truck through,” says Elliott. “But that’s okay, so did the Continental Congress. The structure will be refined, but outside of our advisory representatives, it will not by you.”

“The Continental Congress defeated the British Empire, so if it’s like that, we should congratulate ourselves,” one student quips.

The next morning, the proposal passed without a hitch.

A group of Metro students is passing around a couple of sketchbooks filled with pencil drawings of people, pasted-in maps, lists, thoughts and watercolor images of the city of Rome one day after school. Created by architecture students from Ohio State University, the journals present an alternative way for the high school students to think about how they might soon experience the Italian city.

OSU professor Kay Bea Jones pages through multiple Powerpoint slides from the many trips to Italy with students that she has taken over the past 23 years.

“The idea of a sketchbook is one way to take loose notes. You’re absorbing all of this information in a way that a camera can’t do it,” she tells the group. “The camera almost starts to become like blinders for the front of your face.”

It’s not that they shouldn’t take pictures, she tells them. It’s that they can use the camera like a “sketching tool” – instead of trying to emulate the work of thousands of travel photographers who have printed hundreds of pristine images of the sculptures, ruins and buildings of Rome for postcard stands and coffee table books, they can, for example, stand in one place and shoot several images over 180 degrees, then reassemble them in mosaic form once they’ve been printed.

“You end up making an image that pushes outside the scale of an ordinary photograph,” she tells the group.

Beyond her ideas about how to process and preserve the many sights of Rome that they will soon take in over spring break, she explains the organization of the city through maps of its roads and obelisks, as well as the cultural significance of the image of the she-wolf in the city’s artwork (the wild mother who raised Remus and Romulus, the first king of Rome in the city’s creation myth). She tells them not to hesitate to enter any cathedral doors that they see open as they walk through the city and note the presence of water in the gravity fountains throughout the city, fed by its ancient system of aqueducts.

It’s just one step in the students’ preparation for their trip, which asks them to engage with the city on multiple levels – to see Rome not simply as romantic postcard images, but for its scientific, cultural and historical qualities, as well as to get a sense of what it is like to live there now. The students have been studying the physics involved in the construction of several monuments, or their cultural significance.

As the date for their departure draws closer, teams of students present to their teacher, Thomas Trang, and a research associate from the PAST Foundation, who will accompany them on their trip.  Teams have plans for projects about the various sites they will visit, and every traveler will have some responsibilities for each project – at each site there will be project managers, interviewers, students who document using video or still cameras.

The research projects range in scope from the sustainability of the aqueduct system to the global draw of the Colosseum to the architectural advantages of the dome and oculus of the Pantheon.

When they come back, their work will be presented to the student body, but, Trang tells them, hopefully somewhere else where the wider community can see it.

“We want to go big on this,” he tells the group. 

Neal Bluel joined the Metro staff this year. From the start, his job didn’t look like that of the average high school science teacher, but that’s what he was looking for. A transplant from Missouri who arrived in Columbus when his wife took a job managing the Waterman Dairy Farm, he spent time researching places he might want to teach, and a couple of years teaching at a local private school before arriving at Metro.

Bluel doesn’t work in a traditional lab. In his first trimester on staff, he didn’t spend much time in the school itself. Instead, he had a classroom at Franklin Park Conservatory, where the biomes and gardens became the laboratory for his third-year students – kids who have already passed or are close to passing the “gateway.” They did things like test water quality and soil samples and researched pest management.

“We take full advantage of Franklin Park,” says Bluel. “We try to get outside as much as possible, bring in the staff to our classroom to talk to the students about what they do.”

And while that certainly taught students a great deal about botany and environmental science, it also gave the conservatory data that it can use when it comes to making decisions about things like the fertilizer it should buy. In return for allowing Metro to use classroom space, it received thousands of dollars worth of water quality testing for free.

“When schools go out and look in the community for partnerships, they often approach it with a posture of ‘ what are you going to do for me?’” says Bluel. But the internships, independent research projects and off-site classes Metro students engage in were designed differently from the outset. “The general idea is that our students work for the facility they are housed in.”

With each year Metro has added a new class of students, the school has also added necessary staff.  That means the character changes a little every fall, and Bluel didn’t find it easy to fit in at first.

“I was intimidated by the teachers that I met. It was hard for me to figure out my place for the first month,” he says. He describes the small staff –  positively– as one with “multiple dynamic personalities.”

Bluel also expected that integrating his subject and collaborating with other teachers would be easier, but time constraints on core curriculum teachers, who have more students in their classrooms than he does, have made that more difficult.

It also requires a different way of thinking.

“When you integrate, you have to be willing to not be right, to share your info and to let go of barriers that competition – for student interest, money, time or space – might raise,” he says.

Some of his ideas were shrugged off by colleagues as “already tried,” in spite of the school’s newness, but he understood that some of that resistance stemmed from its rapid growth – at Metro, everyone is always working to adapt.

Still, he has forged ahead with new ideas, building partnerships with various departments at OSU, using them to help build the skills for independent study and undertaking a large-scale project called Growing America that will give students direct, hands-on experience with agriculture from the cultivation of food to its local marketing.

            “This is a pre-commencement commencement,” Spanish teacher Ellen Hogue tells a small group assembled in a classroom after school.  “It is Mitch’s opportunity to tell us what he has learned and how he has developed during his time at Metro.”

            The crowd that has gathered for third-year student Mitchell Rhodes’ “Gateway” would probably be intimidating to anyone. Two of his teachers, the school’s assistant principal, one of closest peers, a couple of community members who are meeting him for the first time and his parents sit at tables. If he makes the case convincingly that he is mature and independent enough to be move beyond high school classes on this December day, new doors will open to him, including the ability to take college-level courses at Ohio State. 

            The session begins with one of Mitch’s friends, who takes the podium as his advocate and tells the group about their history together – how quickly they became friends the first year of school and they have since completed projects.

            “To me, he has proven that he is able to take on new challenges,” he says.

            Mitch gets up to make his PowerPoint presentation. There are several points that he has to address. He has to share an analogy about his high school experience and answer essential questions. Then he has to demonstrate that he embodies the six key Metro habits: critical thinker, collaborator, engaged learner, inquiring learner, communicator and active and responsible decision-maker, then present SMART Goals he has to sustain and improve upon those qualities.

            First, he compares himself to the Night Elf character in the video game of Warcraft – one who had weak weapons, poor vision and wasn’t able to foresee problems. But his new tools, he says, such as “writing skills and math skills, provide me with a way to attack life.”

            He pages through his slides, explaining how his work in a Socratic Seminar showed him to be an engaged learner, how a theatrical performance in his literature class helped him master communication and how a research internship at Battelle — one of the largest scientific and technological research and development companies in the country — that trimester helped him to master inquiry.

            Just a few days earlier, Mitch had been in front of a crowd at Battelle, making an impressive presentation about what he had learned there. In addition to working with the head of the corporate newsletter, for which he composed an article about soy-based plasticizers, he did a major research project. In it, he graphed the U.S. budget for research and development over the past several decades in a variety of areas, like education, defense and space exploration, then presented them in a series of charts using Excel and talked about their correspondence to historical events.

            But he only has time to scratch the surface in explaining that experience today.

            “At different points, you talked about going back to your home school,” Hogue says to him after he completes his presentation. “How do you feel about that now?”

            “I think I’ve  learned that there are opportunities here,” he tells the group. “I’ve learned life isn’t going to be handed to you – you have to go at it. I think I’ve learned to think for myself – to take what everyone says and form my own opinions.”

            “I think you’ve made a clear case that you’ve developed the Metro Habits,” social studies teacher Jeff Elliott says. “We also learn to identify places we can become stronger. What areas are you looking to develop, Mitch?”

            “Organization is one of the hardest things I have to learn as a student. My biggest problems have had to do with that,” he tells the group.

            After a bit more grilling, Mitch is excused from the room so the group can confer about him and vote on his ability to Gateway.

            His teachers and his parents do their own reflecting on his academic growth, mostly noting how much he had changed over the course of the past two years. 

            “I had Mitch the first trimester. He wasn’t focused. He relied on his sense of humor,” says Hogue. “The difference between Mitch that first trimester and Mitch this trimester – it’s just a world of difference.”

            After a brief deliberation, the room is unanimous. They call Mitch back inside.

            “I think we all agree that you have developed beautifully,” Hogue tells him. “We all want you to move forward. You are definitely Gatewayed.”

            Everyone applauds. Mitch smiles. Kind of shy in disposition, he doesn’t say much in response, but he clearly looks relieved and happy.

            “This is so cool,” his mother beams. “I can’t even imagine going through something public like this when I was 16.”

            “You are no longer the same person,” Elliott says to him. “It’s not the fastest person in the race, but the hardest working that is the most successful, and you’ve developed those qualities.”