How One School is Working to Save a City on the Brink
Lt. Governor Dan Forest (right) speaks at Phoenix Academy’s groundbreaking, as Timco’s Kip Blakely (left) looks on.
The Great Recession hit America hard. One of its many victims was High Point, North Carolina. Twenty years ago, High Point’s downtown was bustling with activity as the “Furniture Capitol of The World.” Now, the drive into town is littered with vacant lots, abandoned factories, and empty showrooms, the latter used only during the city’s semi-annual Furniture Market. Like many American towns, High Point has seen most of its manufacturing jobs shipped off to China, leaving families without employment and opportunity.
Yet from the ashes of High Point, one school is rising to provide children not only a quality education, but also a place in the workforce upon graduation. That school is Phoenix Academy.
“Our psychiatrist gave up on our son, so we gave up on our psychiatrist”
Paul and Kim Norcross did not expect to enter the education field. Like many in High Point, came from a family furniture business and started a successful Project and Supply Management Company. That all changed when they were told their oldest son, Matthew, who suffered several severe seizures as a child, wouldn’t be able to live a normal life.
“They started in 1997 with 5 students operating in the back of a church. Now Phoenix Academy has over 900 students.”
“[The psychiatrist] told us he was ‘mentally retarded, microsephalic and autistic,’ and that it was a ‘good thing he has a little sister to take care of him when you’re dead,’” Mr. Norcross told Opportunity Lives.
“Our psychiatrist gave up on our son, so we gave up on our psychiatrist.”
Rather than put Matthew in a public school where he would simply be categorized as “special needs”, the Norcrosses started their own.
“We started in 1997 with 5 students operating in the back of a church,” Mrs. Norcross said. Two years later they applied for their first charter with the state of North Carolina, and opened up their charter school in 2000.
They took Applied Behavioral Analysis – the teaching method used for autistic and other special needs children – and modified it to apply to all types of students, not just those with special needs.
ABA focuses on positive reinforcement. For instance, a teacher will have five exercises they know the child can do, and add in a sixth unknown exercise. Soon enough, the child learns the sixth exercise and the teacher will add in two unknowns.
“We put a modified program in the charter school because we thought, ‘This is something that doesn’t just have to work with special needs children,’” said Mrs. Norcross. “Every child needs it. It’s a motivator.”
It yielded great results: The fledgling schools’ students regularly performed above the state averages on standardized tests. Their new method became the precursor to Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS).
Soon after the school’s founding, North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction was researching methods to improve on President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education program. Mrs. Norcross told them about PBIS. The program is now used in 18,000 schools nationwide, 1,100 of which are in North Carolina.
What was behind PBIS’s success? “People bought in because it works,” Mrs. Norcross said. “And it’s never the exact same in each school; it allows teachers to ad their own flavor to it.”
Since then Phoenix Academy has boomed. It has grown 300 percent in the past three years, to nearly 900 students grades K-7. The Norcrosses opened their newest middle school building this year, and became the only charter school in the state to offer an International Baccalaureate Program. Now they’ve just broken ground on a high school with an innovative mission: it will equip the students to directly enter the workforce upon receiving their diploma.
A Model for the Future?
On an overcast September morning, a crowd of elected officials, business executives, teachers, and parents gathered in a field outside downtown High Point. The occasion was the official groundbreaking of Phoenix Academy’s new School of Aerospace, which, in partnership with the local aviation industry, will offer a job training programs so its students can qualify for the many jobs found near the city’s regional airport and factories.
“This is a big day for High Point, and a big day for Phoenix Academy,” North Carolina’s Republican Lt. Governor Dan Forest told the crowd. The school’s aerospace program is a “great opportunity for the Triad,” Forest said, referring to the neighboring cities of High Point, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem. The school will “hone in on the industry that’s going to create…the vast majority of jobs in these communities for years to come.”
“Timco and the aviation industry could not be more excited about this opportunity to start this school,” said Kip Blakely, Timco Aviation Services’ VP of Industry and Government Relations. “We want to work with them on their curricula. We want to create job-shadowing opportunities in our different companies and businesses.”
Blakely also highlighted internship programs for the students in their final two years of school, while they’re dual enrolled in local Guilford Technical Community College.
“That way when they get their diploma,” Blakely said, “they’ll also have a certificate and they’ll be working right into a job, and be right here in our community for many years to come.”
With the demand for skilled workers still high and likely to remain so, it is companies like Timco and Honda Jet – each with a significant presence in the Triad – that will hire the graduates of Phoenix Academy’s Aerospace program.
Indeed, Phoenix Academy’s model could provide a solution to a growing problem facing many American businesses and workers. While advances in machinery reduced the need for low-skilled labor in the manufacturing sector, demand remains high for workers with the technical capability to operate those machines.
“Timco, Honda Jet, they want to keep their business here. They want to keep the jobs in this community”
That’s where Phoenix Academy’s School of Aerospace comes in. Ed Frye, a retired Air Force colonel who serves as the Director of the school’s Aerospace Program, plans on his students filling that void for the local aviation industry.
“Honda Jet has 1,200 jobs here in the Triad. Timco has roughly 1,700,” Col. Frye told Opportunity Lives. All told there are 3,500 jobs based around the Piedmont-Triad International airport, and the businesses want to expand, provided there’s enough labor.
“Timco, Honda Jet, they want to keep their business here. They want to keep the jobs in this community,” said Frye. He added that Timco’s Blakely estimates the aviation industry could hire 1,000 new employees a year, if there were enough skilled workers.
“After our first graduating class in 2017, we’ll be sending 60-120 skilled kids into the workforce every year,” predicts Frye. Even if there were multiple other schools with similar programs, he said, they still wouldn’t begin to fill the overwhelming demand from the local industry.
While the school and the local aviation industry would like the students to stay in the Triad, Frye says the skills the students will receive are portable and can lead to good paying jobs across the country.
But Phoenix Academy’s mission is greater than providing businesses with the labor they need. Frye and the Norcrosses want to give the students the opportunity at a good-paying, stable job that will keep jobs in the Triad and give back to the community.
“Our goal is to one, offer them options; two, mentally prepare them for those options; and three prepare them to succeed at the next level,” Frye said. “And this isn’t a job at McDonald’s. This is a decent-paying job, somewhere they can start out making…$14/hour.” After six years, that will likely bump up to $25/hour.
As Frye says, “It’s really a can’t-miss situation for these kids.”
Winning the War
Mrs. Norcross says the success of charter schools will be become more ingrained in society as the years progress, and not only because they’re so successful.
“What you’ll see for the first time in the coming years is parents who went to charter schools themselves. They’ll want to send their children to charters and by then it will be very hard to get rid of them.”
Charter school opponents – mainly teachers’ unions and education bureaucrats – “may claim they’ve won a battle here or there,” she says with a smile, “but we’re winning the war.”
As for Matthew, he’s now studying at Coastal Carolina University to get his degree in Communications and Journalism, and received a 3.2 grade point average last semester. Now he’s currently writing a book about his experiences with ABA and PBIS.
So why is it called Phoenix Academy?
“We decided on Phoenix Academy because our son Matthew, like the phoenix, was able to rise out of the ashes,” Mrs. Norcross said, with a deserved hint of pride. “We want to give all these other kids that same opportunity.”
For the students and the city of High Point, Phoenix Academy will be doing just that.