If you don't give children the opportunity to fail, they won't. That's the attitude taken by educators in Austin, Texas. Dr. Mel D. Coleman, executive director of the Department of Accountability, Student Services and Research with Austin Independent School District (AISD), leads a unique community effort to educate all children in the city, not just the students in AISD. "We aren't going to save everybody, but let's try. We're going to make it difficult for them to fail," says Coleman.

The backbone of the AISD plan is called Diversified Education through Leadership, Technology and Academics or DELTA. DELTA is considered a school-within-a-school offering an open-entry, open-exit diploma and/or GED program designed for the student who has dropped out of school or is at-risk of dropping out. Instruction is individualized and self-paced with the expectation that the student complete the half-day program within two years.

Mollie Guion coordinates DELTA for each of the ten AISD High Schools (Anderson, Austin, Bowie, Crockett, Johnston, Lanier, LBJ, McCallum, Reagan, and Travis) as well as the Alternative Learning Center high school and middle school programs. AISD also collaborates with Huston Tillotson College, a college and high school credit program; Austin Community College Robbins Academy, a community college serving adult and young students; American Institute for Learning, a community-based charter school; 78702 RAYS, serving students living in the city's zip code with the highest dropout rate; and Gardner/Betts, a county juvenile detention center that engages students by providing educational opportunities.

"The success of the program," Guion says, "centers on a unique commitment between the community and the district." In fact, representatives from each of the schools and the district meet every month to build educational relationships throughout Austin. The idea is to drop the competition for students and to strengthen ties between the different institutions to help educate all children.

Every student in the community can take advantage of the program. During the 1996/97 school year more than 1,500 at-risk and former dropouts were back in the DELTA classrooms. At Austin High School, 18 year old Olivia Hodges returned to school after she learned about the program. "I moved out of home when I was 16. I didn't think I could manage school with living alone. Now, I want to go to college."

One reason students like Olivia are returning to school lies in DELTA's curriculum, which is mastery-based and developed by a team of educators aligning concepts and competencies with state and district standards. Lessons are self-paced, utilizing a variety of resources including online courseware. Some courses can be completed entirely online. AISD chose the computer-based education and communications network known as NovaNET® to help make the community approach possible. Olivia spends a half day on NovaNET while working at a local pharmacy. She says, "NovaNET's a tool that's hands on. It allows a different perspective and I can get automatic feedback."


Individualized
Together with DELTA, NovaNET offers courseware to meet an individual student's needs. NovaNET's extensive lesson library of more than 10,000 hours of instruction is also mastery-based and allows students to work at their own pace giving them immediate and positive feedback. That atmosphere is proving to work with a variety of students. Over half of the students assisted by DELTA are considered at risk, 31 percent are former dropouts, and about 4 percent are "Special Education" and regular classroom students. Coleman says, "NovaNET gives us the opportunity to improve on what we're doing and helps provide the changes to make it better."


Flexible Delivery
NovaNET also offers the district flexibility. A direct line from NovaNET's central computer in Champaign, Illinois, fits perfectly into AISD's software delivery system, a state-of-the-art fiber optic network. The system is powerful enough to carry most the district's software, including NovaNET, at high speeds. "The district's fiber optic network allows us to use all kinds of software in all kinds of ways," says AISD network consultant Glen Smith. A district expansion in 1997 brought the total number of computers accessing NovaNET to 324. Of those, half connect though the district network while NovaNET supports the remaining stand-alone computers. NovaNET and the AISD network also allows instructors to dial into the system from their homes.

Once online, students can move to different DELTA schools in the city while keeping the same curriculum without having to start all over again. Additionally, all student records are stored in one central system. Therefore, if students change or leave school all their records can be stored for future use. Gardner/Betts Juvenile Detention Center uses this unique community approach to an extreme. Students spend anywhere from a few hours to a few months in the center. If students are new to NovaNET, DELTA lab director, Rhodney Williams, gives them a pre-test on the system to determine their grade level. NovaNET then automatically prescribes the appropriate lessons. Williams says, "NovaNET fits well into a detention type program because it's individualized. If it's too easy or too hard we can adjust to meet their needs." When students are released back into the community, individual records allow them to return to a DELTA school exactly where they left off.

The most convincing evidence DELTA works is the results. NovaNET has helped the district lower its dropout rate while increasing the number of students who have passed the state exam. Thousands of students who were once on a track to failure are now back in school and achieving tremendous success.

When DELTA first began, AISD had a 3.1 percent drop-out rate before NovaNET was installed. At last report, the number of dropouts was at an all-time low of only 2 percent. Compare that to Bureau of Census data that shows 20 percent of adults in our nation over the age of 25 have not completed high school. Of the 465 recovered dropouts served in 1996/97, 94 received their high school diploma and 24 received their GEDs.

State exit scores have also improved tremendously. The total number of DELTA's alternative students taking the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test for Reading, Writing, and Math was 1,257. Of those, an average of 930 students passed all three subject areas. Coleman says the bottom line for AISD is attitude. "We can change," says Coleman, "and DELTA along with NovaNET is making it happen."



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