Photography: [Dustin Ashcraft]

The media has been reporting the failure of America’s school system for decades. Program after program has been rolled out, each one promising that it will turn the tide, but somehow the high school dropout rate continues to climb, and students seem to lower the standards more and more each year.

Those are alarming trends, but Richard Milburn Academy, a charter school in Corpus Christi, has found a successful strategy that is making a difference for its students, some of whom are struggling against daunting odds. 

Many of the students are the first in their families to ever receive a high school diploma, and many are also juggling jobs and families of their own while trying to complete their education. A school program designed to help students succeed while accommodating their unique circumstances can help them overcome these obstacles.

Denise Blanchard is now in her second year as principal of Richard Milburn Academy. She credits the school’s success to the special relationships formed between the students and the staff, which result from both the culture of the school and the emphasis the academy places on small class sizes and solid, research-based, effective instructional techniques.

The smaller class size “affords students the opportunity to receive more instructional support within the school day,” Blanchard says. She also believes the safe environment and enforcement of attendance and schoolwork requirements “offer the students every avenue to excellence.”

The school graduated its first class of 16 students in 1999. Since then, it has grown every year, with a record 86 students graduating in May 2011, so the school is by all accounts successful.

Students come from the local school district, and currently, 250 students are enrolled and split into two sessions per school day: a morning and an afternoon. This allows the students who have work or childcare duties to incorporate the classes in their daily schedules.

The staff, according to Blanchard, is an integral part of this success story. 

Jan Clement, one of the school’s art teachers, sums it up this way: “The staff is passionate about going above and beyond just teaching to see that each and every student acquires the knowledge and confidence to be successful in their goal of graduating from high school. Encouraging and showing interest in each student and caring about them quite often transforms students from being castaways in our society to success stories.”

Social studies teacher Shannon Seale confirms that it’s all about the students. She says her students have heartbreaking stories, but she is “thrilled” to serve as a stable, positive influence in their lives.

“I was told when I came here that some of these kids had never heard ‘I love you’ or ‘you can do it.’ That’s devastating,” she says. But it is also the reason she loves teaching at the school, and she admits that she loves “encouraging the discouraged, loving the unloved and helping those who need it most desperately.”

Counselor and English teacher Alys Williams sums up the school’s mission best when she says, “I wanted to teach at a school where students mattered, where student needs came first and where all of the adults were in education for the right reason: kids.”

Hector Salinas, who has been teaching for more than 40 years, is entering his third year as a Spanish teacher at the academy. He has dedicated his life to the profession, and he says he loves to teach at Richard Milburn because it is where he feels he is truly needed.

“I feel that not only do the kids need me, but I need them,” he says. “They are my inspiration and the reason why I love the career that I have long enjoyed. I have never considered teaching a job, but a reward made from heaven.” 

The Richard Milburn Academy is part of a network of charter schools around the state, and the model is so successful that the school is honored to announce that it has received six more expansion charters for schools in Texas. 

For the academy in Corpus Christi, Blanchard says the goal is to “continue to provide the best education to our students in accordance with the state’s new assessment standards on End of Course, continue to employ the most talented educators, become a certified AVID school and eventually an AVID demonstration school and produce students [who] are lifelong learners.”

Instilling that love of learning into students makes the teachers at the academy happy to go to work each day. Kristie Huerta, who teaches applied math and applied ELA, tells her favorite student success story that shows the mission of the school in action. 

She met a young man during her first year teaching at the school. He didn’t care about his grades or graduation, and he seemed uninterested in his schoolwork. But that all changed one day when he found her after school and, with tears in his eyes, asked her if she would help him pass his classes so he could graduate. 

“When I asked him what had changed, he told me he was tired of his brother calling him a loser, a low-life, a kid who would never amount to anything,” she says. “He wanted to prove his brother wrong.”

He came to her every time she had a planning period, even though his brother and sister-in-law continued to tell him he was a failure. 

“He proved them both wrong and graduated in June 2010,” Huerta says proudly.

With the right combination of students ready and willing to work hard to achieve their goals, a school designed to accommodate their needs and a principal and staff ensuring that the students come first, the Richard Milburn Academy is changing education in the Coastal Bend.

For more information on Richard Milburn Academy, visit www.milburnschools.org, or call 361-225-4424.