Springfield High is forming its own identity

5:05 PM Saturday, November 7, 2009

Walk the halls of Springfield High School with Campus Director Chris Shaffer and you pick up a vibe that things are coming together for students.

Many Springfield adults may still identify with either North or South, but the current students have left all that behind. They are busy with newfound enthusiasm for a football team good enough to be in the playoffs this weekend. (That’s the first time a Springfield city high school team has been in a playoff since 2002.)

Pep rally fever and Wildcat logos were impossible to miss Friday.

Hang around the kids eating lunch and it’s clear that things are a lot better than people feared when the students were put together from the north and south ends last year.

Some of these students don’t like the bigness of the school, 1,700 to 1,800 kids in a building that is bright, modern but huge.

A few students feel they aren’t known as individuals by the faculty. But others say their teachers are engaged with them.

Certainly the stream of students crowding the halls between classes should feel the presence of Shaffer. Armed with a walkie-talkie, he’s picking out stragglers and moving them along. The occasional student approaches with a question or a plea — “I just got house detention for something I didn’t do,” says one upset young woman. He quickly gets her to a counselor.

He and the other administrators, say the students, have brought a new discipline to the school. Mostly, they like that — far fewer fights than last year. North students say that South students are just like them. Friendships have been formed. Some lunch tables are all white and some are all black, but a surprisingly large number are mixed. Race isn’t as important to this generation as many adults might suppose, said one administrator monitoring the lunchroom.

Shaffer has enforced a dress code, an end to sexually explicit displays at dances and extended discipline to the staff. He walks unannounced into classrooms and he expects to find teaching going on. If not, teachers will learn that he wants the curriculum to be taught from bell to bell. No sitting down, no movies.

He wants the students focused on education and he thinks Springfield High has a good chance to pull that off. He repeatedly says the students in the school overwhelmingly are good kids.

That’s a far cry from the problems he faced in the urban Columbus school he came from.

There’s still a lot to be done. The idea of dividing the student body into four smaller schools needs work.

Students and faculty are looking for ways to make the school better through the Initiative to Improve Student Achievement at SHS. That group is now planning to present their findings at community forums starting in December.

The hope for the new school was that it would bring the city together. It’s the one place where kids from all corners of the community come together.

This weekend a lot of people in Springfield have been following the school’s football team in an uphill contest to advance. (Coach Rick Robertson and his staff have done a remarkable job of taking a fledgling program a long way in a short time.)

But football isn’t the only thing that’s improving.

Shaffer wants students to be talking about academics, about what they’re learning. That might be a lot to ask of teenagers, but it’s not too much.

And despite some negativity from adults who still cling to the past, the high school environment is being prepared for the possibility of being something better than the sum of its parts.

Share this article

ADD COMMENT

Comments feed

Shaffer seems to be doing a great job cleaning house and enforcing discipline within the school. However, the last months have shown that he makes decisions without researching facts needed for accurate assessment of the situations. Again, he is doing a great job, but feels his ideas and opinions are the only ones that matter in his decision making. There is no synergy with his faculty; it is the Shaffer Way or the highway. Good luck in this short lonely road you are paving, Chris.

Shaffer's Way
9:47 PM, 11/9/2009

REPORT ABUSE

We welcome your comments. Please remember this is a public forum and behave appropriately. Your comments must conform to our visitor's agreement.