In order to increase the academic achievement of minority students, LTHS administrators formed the Equity and Achievement Team (EA Team) to advocate for the correct level of placement for students during their freshman year to ensure enrollment in an AP class by senior year. The first group of students is compromised of 42 freshman from the class of 2019.

Back in 2013, the Board of Education developed a goal to look at the achievement of minority students at LT, as they do not tend to be as scholastically achieving as their white counterparts.

“I was happy to take that on as an initiative — to first identify the problem, see if it really is a problem, and then to look at some data,” Principal Brain Waterman said.

The discussion then evolved into a concern not so much about race, but the socioeconomic level of students’ parents. Nationwide, the greatest factor in a student’s success is the socioeconomic level of his or her parents. The problem was that parents of students from disadvantaged backgrounds were not as involved with their students’ curriculum as other parents.

“Through data collection, we found that you can come out of eighth grade with the same exact Explore score placing you into a prep level class, but the common historic trend was that if you come from an affluent two-parent household, your parents would call the school and advocate you for Accel and you’d be placed into Accel and you would do just fine,” Waterman said. “It then became — ‘why can’t we, the school, be the advocate for those students?’ They have the same scores, just no parent advocate.”

This year LT did just that. Forty-two incoming minority freshman tested into prep classes but had the same scores as others who moved up to Accel, and through recommendations from feeder schools, LT decided which students to move up.

“I believe I have approximately half of the students [from the EA Team] in my three World History classes,” world history teacher James Milkert said. “Students are students and LT students are the best. I have not noticed a change in the overall grades of my students [due to the inclusion of the students from the EA Team].”

The short term goal of this project was for these students to earn semester grades of 75 percent or higher in World History, English I Accel, Algebra I Accel and Biology Prep. After the fall semester of 2015, 57.1 percent of these students met this requirement in all four classes.

“It is a rigorous academic schedule, and colleges look at the rigor of students’ course-loads and the rigor of the school, so there is benefit in pushing yourself to a reasonable level and doing well,” Assessment and Research Coordinator Katherine Smith said.

The long term goal for these students is to take at least one AP course and pass that test by the time they graduate from LT.

“The program is a benefit to all students as it has allowed teachers to emphasize building relationships with our students, communicating relevant and meaningful objectives and teaching depth rather than breadth,” Milkert said.

The program will continue into next year with 49 incoming freshman from the class of 2020. Ironically, the students chosen are not aware of the tracking.

“We thought about providing mentoring, orientations, or weekly pizza parties, but we came to the conclusion that these students can do the work, they just need to be challenged by being placed into these classes,” Waterman said. “We don’t want them to feel stigmatized or different.”