When he arrived, it was an ‘F’ school, and they didn’t meet expectations for student growth — that’s a measure of how much students are learning in a given academic year, irrespective of whether they’re at grade level.
It was also one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in the state — in the bottom 5%. Fast forward to 2026, it’s a ‘C’ school, and they’ve ‘exceeded expectations’ on growth. Lehocky said a large increase in student growth pushed them finally from a ‘D’ to a ‘C’ school report card grade. They’re now in the top 5% for growth statewide.
Reasons for success
“It's just really everybody got on the same page to do what's best for students, and we believed in them, and they can do it, and we proved that they can just with the results,” he said.
Lehocky says one main contributor to that success.
“We've pretty much had the same staff; unless they've retired, we've had the same people working here for the past three to four years, and that's good too because it's hard to constantly retrain teachers, and, if someone was to say what was the number one thing, I would say it's having a veteran, highly qualified teacher in the classroom,” he said.
Heather Heinze is the school's Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Specialist. She helps students with additional academic and behavioral needs and attributes the school’s success to addressing students' social-emotional needs first.
“We'd completely revamped the core behavior system, and did a lot of giving the teachers back their power in the classroom. We did a lot of [professional development] on core behavior management, and we worked a lot on taking those behaviors that are explosive and trying to either remove them or reduce them. Reduce them first,” Heinze said.
She added that at Forest Hills they prioritize removing additional tasks for teachers who need to focus on academics.
“So that way, the teacher feels supported and encouraged, and we're not adding to their plate,” she said. “We are always there: ‘What can we take off of your plate? What can we do for you? How can I help you with this?’”
A member of the team who helps with that, alongside Heinz, is early learning facilitator Megan Groseclose. She helps teachers plan their lessons around literacy skills.
“So we might learn something, and then the teachers come back, and they're, 'Here's the current reality of my classroom.’ What does that look like, feel like, sound like? And we collect data in our classroom on how that goes, and I'm able to partner and learn with them,” Groseclose said. “So I'm able to co-plan, co-teach, be in there, observe, and support.”
Lehocky again attributes the school’s success to people like Heinz and Groseclose. The school also has a full-time social worker, which they didn’t have before, and some advanced teaching roles where the teacher’s job is to co-teach with other educators.
They also have a math interventions specialist, Justin Robinson.
"We have such a great team; it starts with the teachers. It would have been very easy for them to buck the idea of a new team of people coming in, but they owned it and took accountability from where they were — and still had agency to do what they needed to do," he said.
Additionally, they have a 20-hour-a-week parent liaison who helps translate for the school’s high multilingual learner population, which constitutes about 40% of the school’s students. It also helps that Lehocky has a working knowledge of Spanish and a background in behavioral support.
Forest Hills has a school psychologist, shared with two other schools, and an AIG (academically or intellectually gifted)/instructional coach. Lehocky has also hired three part-time tutors who work throughout the school day. He said students find it difficult to stay after school, so they provide that support during the day.
What could be better
Lehocky says these people make his job easier, but students at Forest Hills still face major hurdles. He said they have the highest percentage of students who are homeless — and who receive backpack meals from NourishNC. Their student population is constantly in flux, with up to 40% of students turning over from year to year. This is partly because some students are homeless or move between relatives’/friends’ homes.
“It's a lot of concentrated issues that go along with poverty in one place, and I think that makes it so challenging. That's why typically the schools that struggle will just continue to struggle because a lot of the issues are concentrated in one place, which makes it hard,” he said.
Lehocky said he understands both sides of the districting equation: parents want to send their students to a neighborhood school, but concentrating students in poverty to this degree systemically might not be the best course of action.
He also said the challenges of working at a high-poverty school demand a certain kind of employee.
“Having high-quality educators come here because it is a hard place to work. It's different working here than at another school that maybe doesn't have the socioeconomic struggles that this school has. So it's almost a different job. So it takes a special kind of person to want to work here, work so hard for the same amount of pay,” he said.
Heinz reiterated that they need to maintain their staffing levels to keep the results they’ve achieved. However, each school year, administrators must make tough decisions.
For example, the state doesn’t pay for Heinz’s MTSS coordinator position, nor does it provide an additional allotment for an advanced teaching role.
“Even if I did want another one, I'm not going to take a teaching position away because then I'll have 30 kids in a classroom, and that's not good for the kids. So it's kind of like a balance. It's not like an extra,” Lehocky said.
Additionally, only kindergarten classes have a teaching assistant in each classroom — and there is one for the entire first grade. They don’t have any for other grade levels.
“It's hard to find a quality person who wants to work 50-plus hours a week for $25,000, but it's such a valuable position,” he said.
They also have to share an art and music teacher with Alderman Elementary, which Lehocky calls ‘inequitable.’
“Some of the schools have an art and music teacher full time, but some of the smaller schools, which ended up also being the high poverty schools, they have split positions. So I have art half the year, music half the year,” he said, “But when you don't have it for half the year, it's more likely that they probably might give up on it, or they're just not going to do it.”
Heinz added that state and local government and the community could step up more for their students.
“We are not a poor county. There is money, and maybe the state's not providing it, but that doesn't mean that there aren't resources within this county to better equip our schools,” she said. “I think that we could do better with summers and after school for our kids. I think we have a lot of kids with a lot of potential, and instead they're stuck at home on tablets, or they're playing in neighborhoods or places that may not be safe or have a positive influence on them.”
One such investment, though, came from The Endowment. Communities In Schools Of Cape Fear was awarded $900,000 to help around 10 schools in the district that can’t raise funds for a Parent-Teacher Association.
Lehocky said this has helped his families, who may not have an extra $25 to give to a PTA fundraiser.
“If you don't have money, then you don't want to do it. I mean, you might want to, but it makes you feel like you're not enough,” he said.
It’s called Friends of Forest Hills, they’ve had coffee trucks and provided lunches for the staff, and the grant gives each teacher $750 for their classroom if needed. They also got about $5,000 to buy school t-shirts and other items.
At the end of the day, Lehocky and his staff meet students and their families where they are, and their goal is to suspend judgment and focus on academic growth and achievement.
“Doesn't get any easier. It's just that you have to show up every day and do the best you can,” Lehocky said.
