New Hanover High School students start each day with the ‘Wildcat Words of Wisdom’ being read over the intercom. For Thursday, February 24th, it was, “when you can't control what's happening, challenge yourself to control the way you respond to what's happening. That's where your power is.”
Kylee Maarschalk, a 12-year veteran English teacher, and Dr. Robert Smith of UNCW’s Watson College of Education understand that teaching students about their power in handling tough situations means understanding the adults and peers who surround them. Maarschalk and Smith have collaborated in the past, pursuing projects on teacher retention and the pandemic’s impact on school staff.
Now, their focus has turned to student safety — and a key part of this safety is having positive role models in schools. This student-adult relationship is important enough that Maarschalk and Smith have designed a study to examine the value of campus groups like the advanced curriculum program Lyceum Academy, STAE (Striving to Achieve Excellence), or JROTC.
They have two main research questions:
- How does participating, or not participating in a program, affect students’ development of a network and their success at school?
- How does participating, or not participating in a program, vary across student demographics (i.e. race and gender)?
For the second question, Smith said he’d like to see if there is an equity issue in terms of whether certain demographics are likelier to access a program within New Hanover High. A recent equity audit by Sophic Solutions found that some of the district’s signature programs, ones like Lyceum, do have an overrepresentation of white students.
Maarschalk and Smith said they would like to survey all the students at New Hanover; however, the 27-question online survey is opt-in, meaning those students under 17 must have parental permission. After it’s complete, they’d like to do more in-depth interviews with six students, three who are in a program — and three who are not affiliated with one. That way these student voices will provide contextual information to the data they collect on the quantitative portion of the survey.
Origin and need for the survey
The development of this study comes from research out of the Christensen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. In particular, the institute’s Social Capital Playbook states that student academic success is mainly attributed to two things: access to resources and access to relationships.
“We looked at that as a source for guidance to ask some questions to students, with one of the most powerful ones being, who helped you get to where you are today? And I was like, ‘Man if I asked my own self that I can name multiple people’, but can all of my students name multiple people who have gotten them to where they are today?” said Maarschalk.
Maarschalk said the results of the survey could provide an estimate of how many of their students can’t pinpoint a positive role model.
According to Maarschalk, the school has endured collective traumas like Hurricane Florence, the Covid-19 pandemic, and now community violence. There was the August 2021 school shooting — and more recently, in February, one of its students was shot at a Celebration of Life Event near Creekwood.
Along with her colleagues at New Hanover, Maarschalk said she is doing her best to help students talk about the impact of these events.
“Our students, our young people, our teenagers, a lot of times are turning inward rather than outward for a lot of their forms of processing because they don't have anybody else to guide them through that. So, [...] can teachers help foster that safe space for students to be willing to network with one another, and to feel comfortable enough to share some of the things that they might have otherwise turned inward for?” said Maarschalk.
Dr. Smith said asking these types of questions is crucial: “After this school shooting at New Hanover High, there was a lot of attention given to what can we do to reduce violence, both in our communities and in schools. And I think the important connection to the work that we're doing is that students need to have caring adults in their lives. And that's why schools have a critical role, and why this study looking at relationships is not only about how we support students' success, it's also about how we provide safer schools.”
Smith referenced Port City Daily’s coverage of the district’s most recent “Let’s Talk Student Voices Matter” report where five focus groups of about 90 students said that having a supportive, caring adult is an important factor in student safety. Maarschalk and Smith said their ‘relationship’ case study at New Hanover High School could further complement this focus group finding.
What students need to succeed
Maarschalk and Smith hypothesize that these strong student-adult relationships are being built in close-knit communities within a school like in STAE, JROTC, or Lyceum.
“It's a bit like the analogy of a basketball team, the players on the team have a sense of identity. And in large high schools, students may ideally have a sense of connection to the larger high school, but typically, they're going to find meaning within smaller programs,” said Smith.
In these settings with “intentionally created resources”, according to Maarschalk, it’s easier for students to have someone in their corner “who keeps them accountable for what they’re doing, what they’re not doing. And says, ‘Hey, I know you can do better; I believe in you, or how can I help?’”
Dr. Smith said that while the study is looking at how relationships relate to student success — how we measure success in school needs to evolve.
“We've only looked at it in terms of how our students doing in terms of learning English and math. And I think we have to recognize that schools are playing a major role in terms of the overall development of human beings. [...] This is about the wellness of human beings and ultimately, the wellness of our community. And we got to put the resources into it. [...]And so we need to either reduce the class sizes to enable teachers to provide the one-on-one that students need or else we've got to create these structures [small group structures],” said Smith.
And Maarschalk said it takes mutual trust in order for school staff to help students develop their sense of identity and belonging at school.
“We can't walk through life having a fake sense of who we are. We need to be our authentic selves so that others will be too because nobody likes somebody that's fake. So if a student can see that I'm being genuine as I talk to you about this thing, I'm being genuine as I asked you, ‘Hey, baby, why are sleeping right now, did you have an okay safe space last night? I recognize you're not falling asleep because I'm boring. No, I'm doing a full show and dance up here.’ But you need to see that I care,” said Maarschalk.
While the focus is providing students with more individualized attention, Maarschalk and Smith acknowledge this can be difficult when high school teachers have about 90 to 100 students per semester, upwards of 180 for the year. So the district, according to Maarschalk, could benefit from having more teachers, more support staff, and more counselors.
“Are the funds going there to make that happen? That's another question. And that's a whole other ballgame that this survey will not answer, but maybe it can help support the foundation for encouraging that. So I'm grateful that New Hanover County Schools wants to know the results of our survey – that they care to know so that maybe they can use that to inform some future budget situations,” said Maarschalk.
The findings of the ‘relationship’ study at New Hanover High School will be ready later this spring — and Maarschalk and Smith hope their results could inform the district on how to create the best learning environments for students.
More information about the survey will be provided at New Hanover’s Centennial Community Open House from 5:30-7:30 on Wednesday, March 9th.
NHCS relationship study by Ben Schachtman on Scribd
