“High S.C.O.R.E. ” School Program Facts

The 10 schools involved in the “High S.C.O.R.E.” Program are:

Building on the experiences the District gained from a project started in 1995 which was designed to intervene in the overwhelming dropout rate of ninth grade students, another program initiative was formulated that would restructure ten (10) of Detroit’s high schools into smaller learning units. The new initiative was designed to strengthen the 1995 project, locally known as the Ninth Grade Restructuring Project and employed the strategy of ninth grade academies by expanding the program to include all grades. The new programs are called the High School Smaller Communities Organized to Reform Education (High S.C.O.R.E.) Program.

The ten (10) high schools are sub-grouped into 9th grade communities and multi-age career communities for grades 10 - 12. Each of the communities has its own administrator, academy leaders, and academy academic teams. These communities combine several smaller learning strategies into a comprehensive multi-faceted approach to restructuring strategy. These strategies are tailored to the specifics of the communities own environment. These smaller learning communities were designed to address the overwhelming majority of high schools that are defined by national standards and extensive research as being large. In the Detroit Public Schools, large means high schools with more that 1,000 students enrolled. The achievement levels, test scores, grade point averages, dropout rate and behavior code violations in Detroit are all consistent with what research shows for large high schools. The development of these programs is intended to reorganize and intervene in the identified gaps and weaknesses existing in these schools and to attain other benefits that smaller learning communities provide.

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