Eight Years, Big Impact: Celebrating University Charter School in Livingston, AL

University Charter School (UCS) is a rural school unlike any other. It first opened its doors in 2018, on the campus of the University of West Alabama (UWA) in Livingston, AL, as part of the university’s College of Education. It has since taken off, and offers stellar educational opportunities to students from Pre-K all the way through high school, while also providing hands-on learning opportunities for pre-service teachers at UWA. The University Charter School is also one of ten schools in the Black Belt participating in the GRAD Partnership, a national initiative aimed at fostering student success systems in schools, and the University of West Alabama is a founding intermediary in RSC’s GRAD Partnership Rural Cohort. The University of West Alabama anchors RSC’s Black Belt Regional Hub.

When University Charter School first signed on to the GRAD Partnership and began implementing student success systems, they were in only their fifth year as a school, and still trying to uncover how to maximize their potential as a university-affiliated learning community. Student success systems through the GRAD Partnership, which focus on strong, supportive relationships, actionable data, strategic improvement actions, and student-centered mindsets, made all the sense in the world as UCS continued to define what kind of school they wanted to be. Early efforts focused on an in-school coffee shop, BrewCS, part of an initiative that helps students prepare to enter the workforce with ready-made skills.

Even though that work began four years ago, Brandon Broach, the high school principal, describes that they are still very young as a school, which frees up the team to innovate, adjust, and become the school they want to be: “We're so early as an organization, trying to figure out what is the right combination of processes and procedures for our particular rural demographic, for this particular group of students and the families in the community. And so that makes us a very dynamic organization.”

A core focus has been on making students aware of and prepared for opportunities that lie outside of rural Sumter County; Brandon notes that many students have never left the county, and so providing career-oriented field trips is crucial to expanding their horizons: “One of the things that we're built on, and that we do really well, is exposing our kids to how many opportunities there really are. And just because you were born in, grew up in, generationally have been in a small town, doesn't mean it's the only thing out there, right? And so can you stay here and make a living? Can you stay here and make a difference? Absolutely, you can,” adding that recent trips have included visits to manufacturing plants in nearby Meridian, MS, to Tuscaloosa, and to UWA’s Cahaba Biodiversity Center.

The education that happens on-site is also geared towards expanding horizons, and helping students to find their passions that can align with career opportunities. On the day of the RSC team’s visit, students in an agricultural technology class were collaborating on an electrical engineering project, creating control panels, outlets, and better understanding electricity on a wall that they themselves had framed and built. Brandon emphasized the value of bringing career awareness through projects like that: “If for one of those kids it clicks in their brain and [they go], ‘golly, like, I like working with my hands. This is pretty cool!’ Now we stoke that fire for the next couple years, and now they're on a path to doing something [as a career]. If you do something you love to do, you don't really work, right? That's what we always say. And so how do we create opportunities like that around uniting people?”

The UCS staff is also focused on creating those uniting opportunities through extra-curricular activities, wanting to create platforms for all students to feel belonging and connectedness to the school and their peers. He notes that 50% of the students participate in athletics, which leaves potentially half of the students without a built-in source of non-academic community. To address that, they listened to what their students' interests were, and recently founded both a marching band and basketball pep squad.

“We're helping these students build their story,” Brandon beams. “And so when we expose them to different things like that they find these commonalities… Our cheer program is competitive and it's tumbling and it's flying and all those things. Well, we have a subset of other students that want to support their school, they want to support their community and the basketball team, but maybe they don't have the resources to go in and do tumble class or all the things that would give you that skill set. We solved for that this year by creating a basketball pep squad – identifying, first, what those needs are based on our demographic base, and then building programs around that. Now those 12 girls– they have a group.”

The marching band has achieved similar rapid success: “They had their spring concert in May. . . and I was blown away by the amount of parent support and engagement in that room, going nuts for these kids. And they did a fantastic job. But I walked out of there and went, ‘we've created a niche for this group that aren't on the football field.’” On top of the community support, Brandon shares that programs like the pep squad and marching band have led to blossoming friendships between peers: “I watched those kids come out of their shell, you know, but now, you see them walking the hall together.”

Moreover, the UCS staff is utilizing data and creative scheduling to ensure that all students are able to maintain academic success and stay on a path to college and career readiness while at UCS. Brandon comes from a non-educational background, having worked in business, leadership management, and other careers prior, and is a self-described ‘numbers guy’. “Data is our bedrock indicator of our effectiveness,” he describes, noting that the staff have bi-weekly “data meetings with all of our teachers. And prior to those, our instructional team and our coaches are pulling grade reports. They're pulling grade books and assignments and looking at trends in classrooms, looking at trends across one student, across their classes” to identify courses where a student may be falling behind.

On Wednesdays, UCS shakes up their typical daily schedule, offering life skills classes on skills like accounting, credit, resumes, and job interview skills. They also make available language arts, math, and science teachers, who can offer personalized remediation in real-time, when students need it most. “That kid gets pulled usually from either the leadership or the life skills class for that day. And they're now with the math, or with the English teacher, working on remediation, and that's all based on the data… We don’t want to wait until March” to intervene, Brandon emphasized.

Hearing about all of the programs, student support systems, and opportunities available, it can be hard to believe that University Charter School hasn’t been around even for a decade. Brandon reflects that “We’ve only been a school for eight years… in that short amount of time, the amount of community impact, the amount of students' lives that have been changed in a positive direction, and community partnerships that have been born… has been tremendous. And I think it's a testament not only to the leadership whose idea it was to birth this thing, [but also] the support that they were able to gather quickly in the community.”

Rural Schools Collaborative would like to thank Dr. Annah Rogers for her facilitation of our visit to the Alabama Black Belt, and for her innovative leadership to support the ten participating GRAD Partnership schools in Alabama and Mississippi.