A little more than two years ago, the Coupeville School District was awarded a $268,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since receiving the award in the summer of 2002, officials have instituted a variety of programs changes at Coupeville Middle School and High School.

Officials hope the changes will make the curriculum more rigorous and relevant to the students while lowering the dropout rate.

“Our goal is to not let any student slip through the cracks,” said Phyllis Textor, principal at Coupeville Middle and High School.

With the grant money, the school was able to institute learning communities, advocacy groups and purchase more computers.

Learning communities combine two classes: English and history or English and science depending on the grade level. Two teachers will share and integrate both classes and allow for coursework that combines both subject matters.

For one teacher, the learning communities provide time for projects that couldn’t be done in a one-hour class.

The American Studies class at the high school combines History and English. The extended class time allows for students to work internships throughout the community.

“Students can see projects that have relevance in their own community,” said Mark Gale, a teacher at Coupeville High School.

He added that the work performed by the students provides a real service to the community and shows how academic subjects apply to the workplace. That provides some motivation for students to perform in the classroom.

The learning communities had to be tweaked this year, going from three subjects to two. Textor said that needed to be done because of scheduling conflicts with the learning communities and classes such as band and physics.

Math currently is not part of learning communities. For that to happen, the math courses need to be changed and Textor said she hopes that can be done in the future.

The school also implemented advocacy groups where students are divided into small groups and placed with an adult. The groups are designed to help the school seem smaller.

“Our goal is to make a community out of 16 to 18 kids,” Textor said. Each group is comprised of students from all backgrounds and meets several times a week and cover a variety of topics that range from team building exercises to testing requirements.

One person from each group is named a representative to the student body council. That increased the number students on the council from eight to 28.

“It basically tripled the student voice in student government,” Textor said.

Ideas for the programs came about several years ago when Coupeville officials visited various schools around the state and United States. They toured the schools to get a first-hand look at how programs are applied.

The learning communities are based on a program operated by a high school in Chicago, Ill., and the advocacy groups come from a high school in Vancouver, Wash. The trips were financed with money from the Gates Grant.

“We took little bits and pieces from different schools that we liked and we built our own model,” Textor said.

The bulk of the Gates Grant funding went to improve technology at the middle school and high school.

The school district was able to purchase enough computers to have a ratio of one for every four students in the middle school and high school. Every class has between six and eight computers and the school has three computer labs.

Textor said the computers are a big help, especially considering 20 percent of the students don’t have access to a computer at home.

With the new computers, the school district has to maintain the new hardware and develop a budget to keep up with maintenance and technology updates.

While the new programs at the high school are being modified this year, the people involved with them are having a voice in designing a new high school.

Staff and students are providing input on the $19 million high school that is being funded with a bond that voters approved last May.

Textor said ideas call for designing the new school that will better implement recent programs. Such ideas include providing space that would allow advocacy groups to meet and classroom pods, complete with a science class, to better operate learning communities.