DENVER — Highline Academy Charter School Southeast is getting national recognition for creating a curriculum to help close the learning gap. The tuition-free Denver Public Schools charter school is a National Blue Ribbon School and was recently recognized as a U.S. News Best elementary and Middle school for creating a culturally relevant curriculum that takes a closer look at current events and honors communities' lived experiences.
The southeast campus serves more than 500 students representing 50 countries and 26 different languages. Sarah Verni-Lau is the principal of the southeast campus and said the mission of the school is to serve a diverse student community.
“We are really looking to seeing our gap data close,” Verni-Lau said. “So, we don’t want to see our white students and our traditionally underserved students have a huge gap, and that’s part of serving a diverse population.”
According to U.S News, the school’s population is 42% white, 25% Black, and 23% Hispanic or Latino. Verni-Lau gives autonomy to her teachers for them to understand the students and create an engaging curriculum.
“Any teacher can open a curriculum and teach what is on the page in front of them,” Verni-Lau said. “But a teacher who has that relationship and deep awareness of their students and then you can put content in front of them that really relates to them and speaks to them. Engages students in a different way.”
The school focuses on a custom whole-child curriculum based on inclusivity along with their academics. Verni-Lau believes their lesson plan is working.
“We do use state standards to drive our instruction and make sure that we’re meeting the learning targets that are expected for students,” Verni-Lau said. “Our students respond to that, they feel seen, they feel heard, they feel like their experiences are reflected in what’s happening in the classroom and they’re able to engage in a way that you don’t maybe see in other spaces where teachers aren’t afforded the same autonomies.”
Leah-Michael Dillard is a 7th-grade English language arts teacher and has been teaching at the southeast campus for seven years. She said in her 24 years as an educator, teaching at the charter school was the best fit.
“For me, Highline was everything I was looking for,” Dillard said. “With this belief in civic engagement, this belief in social/emotional learning, this belief in the whole child, this belief in anti-racist education…all of those things have been deeply important to me so finding a place where I get to not only bring that to myself but also to my students has been huge.”
Dillard likes the autonomy of the charter school, where teachers have the freedom to create an academic curriculum based on the current social/emotional needs of their students.
“Right now, my students are learning and reading about ‘Before We Were Free,” which is about dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic in the 1960s,” Dillard said. “I have students who are immigrants from Venezuela, which is dealing with something very similar.”
It’s a lesson plan that’s giving results the school and Verni-Lau have been hoping for.
“We don’t have a gap in certain areas between our Black students and our white students and that has been a huge accomplishment and is certainly something that has been shrinking over time,” she said. “You see things not just in our data but in our attendance rates. Just the way the kids show up every day, it’s clear that they feel valued at school and school is valuable to them.”
Students like eighth grader Noah Hanyo -LittleJohn. He’s been attending Highline’s southeast campus since kindergarten. He said the school’s success rate for Black students keeps him motivated.
“It makes you want to work harder,” LittleJohn said. “It makes you feel proud because what we’re doing is actually bringing notoriety.”
The charter school’s teaching methods are also being studied by university researchers as part of the Denver Public Schools Black Student Success work. DU associate professor Erin Anderson worked with DPS’ Black Student Success (BSS) team to identify classroom practices and strategies of teachers like Dillard. The goal is to increase graduation rates and grade level performance in struggling schools across the district.
“It’s definitely amazing to see our teachers recognized for the work that they’re doing and to see our students recognized for the growth that they’re making,” Verni-Lau said. “I’m happy to see the things we’re doing here are transferable to other spaces because ultimately the goal is that we’re impacting more kids and we’re serving more students across Denver.”
For more information about Highline Academy Southeast, click here.
