Square Pegs

At first glance, Catalyst High School, tucked away in a nondescript office park in Lafayette, looks like a dentist’s office. Or a place that sells car insurance. Or even a paper company like Dunder Mifflin. What it doesn’t look like at all — with its muted carpet, a corner lounge area lit by strings of white lights and tiny, office-sized classrooms —is a high school.

“Well, I hope not,” said Ed Porritt, the founder and executive director of this small six-year-old high school that is the essence of “alternative education.” Home to about 40 students, Catalyst has thrown out the traditional education playbook and come up with its own ideas about how to teach. It gets its cue, Porritt says, from the students themselves.

“Students create their own individualized contracts with teachers,” he said. “For every one of our students, we have created for them what’s called a customized academic plan. … It identifies the student’s strengths, their interests and their long-term goals, and it identifies their academic goals. The teacher working hand-in-hand with the student knows what they’re good at, what their deficiencies are and what their goals are. It’s a conversation starter.”

The curriculum at Catalyst is also a good conversation starter, because it’s as unique as each student. No two educational contracts are the same. Rhys Olsen, a student who went to three schools (including taking classes at CU) as well as being homeschooled before landing at Catalyst earlier this year, tried to help a visitor understand how eclectic the classes could be. In a classroom with just two other pupils and the teacher (class sizes rarely exceed six students per teacher), he was composing a college entrance essay and working with classmate Liam Fox to create a style for the document that combined Chicago and MLA “with a few personal adjustments.”

“For me, this is a composition class,” Olsen said, “but it’s also turned into a political science class.”

His other classmate, Stephanie Kilpatrick, defined Catalyst as a place where “we learn what we want to learn at our own pace, and you can tailor it to how you learn best.”

What does that look like in practice? Past Catalyst students have learned about the physics of sound by reconstructing a cello. They’ve learned about social justice by participating in Peace Jam. A teacher introducing the civil rights movement once started the discussion by reading a poem by Joan Baez and then seeing where the discussion led. Musicians in geography classes can study the countries of their favorite composers, and those interested in film and communication can learn broadcast skills at Catalyst’s in-house TV studio, which is also used by East Boulder County’s public access station. One student choose to study bulimia and anorexia as part of her life sciences class.

“The only thing we have in common,” Olsen said, “is that a typical education wasn’t working for us.”

Although Porritt started Catalyst as a place for students who weren’t thriving in traditional classrooms, he says the structure is applicable to all kids. But the school seems particularly suited for those who benefit from a more dynamic learning environment. Days are shorter, classes are more intimate and there’s a focus on community involvement you’d be hard pressed to find in other schools.

“The biggest benefit is being able to advocate for myself,” said 17-year-old Scooby Davie, who was on her way to a photography class. (When asked if Scooby was her real name, she laughed and said, “It’s as real as it’s going to get.”)

“If I put in a lot of effort, I will get a fantastic result,” she said. She came to Catalyst from Fairview High School in Boulder, which she found to be too regimented, rushed and structured, to the point where it seemed learning was often less important than adhering to rules and schedules.

“I’m thriving here more than I ever have,” she said.

And it’s not just the students who are thriving. Mark Friedman, a retired science teacher from the Thompson School District—who, when asked what he teaches at Catalyst, simply says, “I teach students”—calls his man-of-many-hats role “a dream teaching job.” In addition to science, he also teaches art, poetry, music, marketing and web design as well as helping to run the TV studio.

“Everything we do is customized around the students’ interests and passions,” he said. “We put them in the driver’s seat of their own education.”

As much as it sounds like it could be, Catalyst is not all fun and games. Accredited through the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement, the instruction is tailored to satisfy enrollment requirements at the best universities in the country, meaning that even though the path to proficiency in a subject might be unusual, proficiency is still required to graduate. And because the class sizes are so small, there’s no slacking off or showing up unprepared.

“You’re in the front row every day,” Porritt says. (It’s also likely that the cost of attending Catalyst provides an incentive to participate, at least in terms of satisfying the parents who are footing the bill—tuition at this private non-profit school is $17,000 per year, although students can apply for scholarships.)

So does this unique approach to education work? Porritt said the proof that it does is right before his eyes every day.

When they arrive at Catalyst, “most of our kids are not earning credits, they’re not functioning, they’re getting a low GPA when they come in,” he says. “When they exit, about 80 percent of our kids are going on to college and having very successful experiences in college. We had a student who wouldn’t write or do math when she got here a couple of years ago and she’s now taking a college level class during her senior year here, and she’s got the highest grade in her college class.

“Right now, we use the statistical data from GPA, from earning credits and from graduation and college entrance as our indicators,” he said, while noting that Catalyst is working with the state on developing more detailed and more skill-based benchmarks in the coming year.

“We have a Mary Poppins-sized tool box,” he said.

For more information about Catalyst, see www.catalysths.org