Dropouts find a hero in the man with the white hat

December 14, 2002

David Brennan started in Ohio, but give him time and he'll plant his Life Skills schools everywhere in the country where there are kids who have given up on high school. And that's just about everywhere.

Brennan is a manufacturing executive from Akron, Ohio, who found himself inadvertently in the business of education when he discovered many of the workers he hired didn't have enough of it. Having started with in-plant schooling for employees, and later for their families, he has moved on to packaging what he has learned about learning into a model for charter schools.

In 1998 he started White Hat Management, which manages schools in Ohio, Arizona and Florida. The company's Life Skills Centers serve high-school dropouts with an individualized, computer-based program combining education with work or community service. Graduates earn a regular diploma, not a GED. There are 14 Life Skills Centers with nearly 4,000 students.

Last week, Denver Public Schools approved a Life Skills Charter, and pending choice of a suitable location, it may open by early summer. It will serve students who are at least 16 years old and have been out of school for four months or more.

Brennan stopped by the Rocky Mountain News last summer, when he was in Denver to meet the people working on the charter application for the proposed school, and explained how the model works.

Students spend four hours a day in school, one hour in a life skills class and three in a 50-station computer lab, staffed by three teachers and two aides. Their progress is based on testing, not seat time, with as many as 12 or 15 tests a year in, say, English. Brennan says he's seen a bright child make a year's progress in math in as little as four weeks.

"We start them a little early," he says, "so they see great achievement right away." For some, he adds, "it's the first time ever they've succeeded in school."

From a third to a half of students who start the program quit, Brennan says. If that sounds discouraging, remember these are kids who have already dropped out -- or been forced out, as he puts it -- and reclaiming half or more of them is as good a record as is posted by many large urban districts with their entire school population. Furthermore, he says, of those who do stay 30 days, 85 percent eventually graduate. They stay in the program up to two years.

The schools are open year round, three shifts a day, for 46 weeks a year. In Ohio, the company offers courses for teachers to complete their certification. And in addition to teaching staff, the schools have social workers and employment counselors who integrate learning with work.

"We find them jobs," he says.

So sitting at a computer for a few hours every day is not your idea of a traditional high school education. That's just the point, isn't it? Traditional doesn't work for everybody, so there should be other choices. Brennan is a strong supporter of school choice -- all kinds -- and played a significant role in the Cleveland school voucher plan that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.

In fact, Brennan said, the more students are struggling, the more effective computer-aided instruction is for them -- "private, color-blind, under their control," he says.

If the company has to build a school, Brennan says, it can do so for $5 million -- even though the Akron district spends $25 million on theirs. If a district has empty school buildings, as Dayton, Ohio, does, it may use those. But it's not wedded to traditional spaces any more than to traditional instruction. Often Life Skills students are street kids, and 15,000-20,000 square feet in a strip mall, on bus lines, suits the students better.

Brennan has the numbers all mapped out. A typical center can serve about 700 students, with a student-teacher ratio of 11-to-1 (and a computer ratio of 1-to-1). In an urban area, he believes, there's a need for approximately one such center for each 150,000 population.

In addition to the centers for high school students, White Hat operates 10 HOPE Academies, K-8 charter schools in Ohio that use Direct Instruction as their teaching method, and OHDELA, the Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy, a school chartered through the University of Toledo that primarily serves home-schooling families.

Brennan named his company for the white Stetson he likes to wear. Seems just about right.