This School Cut a Class Period for Career Time | Principal Kyle Scott

Rebecca Midles chats with Kyle Scott, principal of Warren High School in Vincent, Ohio, about moving from eight class periods to seven and creating Flex Friday, a schedule that gives juniors and seniors time in career tech labs, internships and job shadows while freshmen and sophomores stay on campus. Most critically, Kyle shares how student interviews and teacher feedback were the catalysts for the change.

Transcript

Kyle Scott: My name’s Kyle Scott. I’m the principal at Warren High School in Vincent, Ohio.

Rebecca Midles: Tell me about what Warren Local Schools was like the year you joined, and who you serve. What did it look like or feel like?

Kyle Scott: So going back, I’m a Warren graduate. The community has always been very supportive of the school system, and we have a lot of people here who love their teachers. We have a lot of people who stay in the area. Appalachian Ohio has one of the highest rates of people who stay in the area in the entire country, so you get a lot of people like me who stay here and live here their entire life. I experienced that through school, and then back in 2017, we passed a levy to get new schools. Those opened up a few years later, and that dramatically shifted the community’s perception in a much more positive direction, even more than what it was.

It was still very similar to how I went to school. You had your core subjects, you had some electives, you had a variety of career tech options, but it wasn’t connecting those things to the community. When I got here in the ’24-’25 school year, we had a manufacturing teacher. We have a great ag program. We have a graphic design program, information technology, all kinds of classes. But our kids weren’t connected to the community. They weren’t connected to enough internships or job shadowing opportunities. They’d been trying through the career center, through Washington State, the community college in Marietta, and through a variety of Friday programs and other pieces, to get kids into phlebotomy or STNA or robotics. That meant they would have to miss class every Friday for an entire semester to get that kind of credentialing or those experiences. Most of our kids said they didn’t want to miss class, especially CCP classes or some of their important pieces, band, choir. “We can’t miss every Friday. That’s sixteen Fridays between now and Christmas.”

That was the first piece that was alarming to me: we had 12 kids out of over 300 in our junior and senior classes taking that opportunity. There should be a lot more who want to do that. Almost every school has some type of program where you can do internships or job shadows, but so often kids don’t do that unless somebody prompts them to, unless they’re forced to, unless there’s an incentive to do that. And then having to miss class and make up their work just wasn’t a way that was going to work.

Talking to kids, some of our best and brightest were never going to do that. They’d say, “I have a test, I have this, I have that.” That was the first piece on the career tech side that I knew needed to change. We have business partners in the area, in Marietta, Parkersburg and Belpre, who are dying to work with our kids because when they do, they see that we have great families, great kids, and a great community that supports those things. But there just wasn’t a method to make that happen.

Going into that first year, I already knew there were a few people who had ideas about what a Flex Friday might look like, and that some other schools in Ohio had tried to roll out something similar. But how do you make that work when you’re allowing your juniors and seniors to go off campus, versus your freshmen and sophomores having to stay on campus? That was the first piece.

Why the Schedule Had to Change

Kyle Scott: The second piece that I saw was our schedule. We had forty-one-minute class periods. Through just normal walkthroughs and evaluations, I quickly found out that you can’t get to the end of a lesson in forty-one minutes. That had to change. All my teachers agreed that they could not get to the point where they were. Every single observation, they would jam-pack what they thought forty-one minutes looked like, and they’d come up fifteen minutes short, it felt like. So that piece was eye-opening. That had to change.

So we started having discussions about how we could make a day every few weeks, or however often, for kids to do internships and job shadows. But that means they’re missing class time now. Part of that was that we had eight class periods per day, so that’s a lot. Can a fifteen-year-old kid have eight classes? My personal opinion, no, that’s too many classes. We don’t ask college kids to have eight classes. We don’t ask anybody else on the planet to have eight. So why are we having these kids take eight classes? Let’s cut it down to seven. By doing that, we got an extra 10 minutes per class. We went from 41 to 51 really quick. And then the time they’re missing on Friday is suddenly now spread across Monday through Thursday. That was a big selling point in that process.

But how were we going to make Friday work? It wasn’t just that we were going to send 200-plus kids off to internships and job shadow opportunities. Some of them have to stay here. Some of them want to be here. That was the toughest part: the actual operational work of sitting down and creating a schedule where our kids could be here and work in our career tech labs, while our freshmen and sophomores were also here working in their classrooms, and the rest of the juniors and seniors were off campus doing what they wanted to do and having that choice. That was definitely the toughest part.

A Community That Had Changed

Rebecca Midles: I appreciate that you surfaced the conditions piece of that. I loved how you said you were a student there at one point, that you were from there, and you were talking about the changing context and what you noticed. I’m going to ask about the students next, but would you say that the community changed too, and that the school didn’t change with it?

Like you said, you came back to a school that was kind of the same, with some changes you needed to tweak. But had the community changed in its needs as far as those connections, job shadows and internships?

Kyle Scott: I think the community had changed. All the feedback that we’ve gotten through Building Bridges to Careers and the other entities that we’ve worked with these three years has told us that the community has specific things they’re looking for from high school graduates. We call it our Portrait of a Warrior, where we have a specific set of character traits that we want our graduates to have when they walk across that stage.

Kyle Scott: I think the community had changed. All the feedback that we’ve gotten through Building Bridges to Careers and the other entities that we’ve worked with these three years has told us that the community has specific things they’re looking for from high school graduates. We call it our Portrait of a Warrior, where we have a specific set of character traits that we want our graduates to have when they walk across that stage.

That was built with the community before I got here in this position, but it was an important piece that was set a few years ago. Then connecting that to what all these businesses were saying now: this is the type of work ethic we’re looking for from a 19- or 20-year-old, this is what we’re looking for from a manufacturing job or a graphic design job or something along those lines. They were much more vocal now than they previously were. I think that’s in part due to the decline in population and the need for certain jobs. Kyle Newton, our superintendent, has worked with a group called Workforce 30 that has analyzed Ohio’s jobs, potential job growth, and population increase and decrease between now and 2050. That is showing us that we do not have enough people to fill all of our jobs, especially skilled labor jobs.

I always find it kind of funny when I talk about this with people, because as principal, obviously I should be in the know on a lot of different things. But when you start talking about workforce development and population increase and decrease, the average person doesn’t make that connection.

And I think all of us in these jobs need to be thinking that way, because I can help these kids be the best they can be in math. I can help my teachers along. But if I don’t have the right programming in my school, and I don’t provide the right opportunities for my kids, I’m not setting our community up for success. I take that very seriously. It’s something I enjoy, and I know that our superintendent has partnered with tons of different people to make that happen and has worked on those committees at the state level and the local level to try to set some of these things up.

Student Voice Makes the Case for Change

Rebecca Midles: What were the initial stories or pieces of student feedback that made it clear the status quo wasn’t going to be enough? And how did those voices become the foundation for your vision of transformation?

Kyle Scott: At the same time I was going through some of that observational data with my teachers and having those conversations about class periods not being long enough and the right things not happening, you want labs, you want hands-on activities, you want experiential learning happening in the classroom, and those weren’t happening. Amy Bookman is one of our guidance counselors. She does a wonderful job, and she had met Chris McNutt through the Human Restoration Project. They went through a set of interviews with students. We actually had students train that first year to interview other students in our building, to try to get the most reliable data and so the students would be comfortable talking with one another.

Essentially, you’d have one or two students leading a conversation, and then the system records everything they say, and AI is able to go through that and spit out what everybody was saying. That team of students analyzed that data, and eventually, at the end of the year, they took that data to MIT and analyzed it with other schools and other students who were doing the exact same thing. They were able to come up with very similar thoughts and feelings to what our leadership team here had. Then those students actually presented their findings to the staff, which in some ways was absolutely amazing. Our staff needed to hear that. But for those kids, it was a little bit nerve-wracking going in front of their teachers and saying that kids think school is boring, that kids think class X, Y, and Z are that way.

Now, of course, we took names and things like that out of it, but it was eye-opening for most of our people to know that kids felt certain ways about school in general, and not just in general, but about our school. We take a lot of pride here, and a lot of our staff are or were veterans who have been here for a long time and love their job. But they knew after some of those conversations that something needed to change, and that sparked some level of acceptance of the schedule change. There was a little bit of resistance, but in general, at first, most people were open to it because they knew that something needed to change. They just didn’t know what they wanted or needed, necessarily, and a lot of people had different feelings about what that needed to look like.

Student Agency Takes Root

Rebecca Midles: That gave you a driver to make that change. That’s good. You don’t have to speak to this if there’s not a story here, but that’s a big commitment. I’m a big fan of Chris McNutt’s work. That’s a big commitment to make, that level of student voice, really putting students at the center of this work and giving them an equal voice.

Is there a story around the intentionality of how you came about this support with the Human Restoration Project? You said you had someone on staff who brought it. Is there more there to share, or not?

Kyle Scott: Not specifically. I guess if Amy were on this podcast, she’d be able to give you a little bit more, because she was the one who worked directly with them. I think it was through Student Agency, Mike Nicholson, that group that hooked Amy up. That’s been another big piece, though it’s kind of tough when there are so many things going on.

But Student Agency is a big piece for us. I told the kids as soon as I got to this position that this is not my school. That is their school, and they have responsibility in helping maintain it and run it operationally. We can change things if they want it to be changed.

One example was graduation. It had been at Marietta College, a 20-minute drive away, for decades. That first year, our senior class got to vote, and they chose to have graduation moved to the football field. It was a beautiful setting. It did unfortunately rain a little bit, but I think it was a piece that needed to happen, and now everybody loves it.

Whether it was homecoming or prom or pep rallies or anything along those lines, student council, National Honor Society, students solving problems, those groups have led to that point. They’ve created new clubs. They’ve created that piece, and it’s let kids be themselves.

It’s let kids give ideas, and the staff is the exact same way. Over the course of these three years, we’ve gone from people staying closed-lipped and not being willing to provide ideas, to giving their thoughts and feelings and feeling like there’s not going to be a repercussion if it’s something somebody disagrees with. The kids are the exact same way. I’ll give the whys when I can, because there are a few things that sometimes are a little bit non-negotiable in my eyes, and I’ll make sure people know why that is as opposed to because I said so.

Keeping Students at the Center

Rebecca Midles: Setting the stage for agency up front made sense, and then it led to the Human Restoration Project work. That’s awesome. I’m going to go right into the next piece, because this is a good flow. You’re focusing heavily on that human community element.

How do you ensure that continues? How do you keep the learners right at the center of that, and that connection to the local workforce? What did that lead to?

Kyle Scott: On the student agency side, in my two years here, I was part of that team, and we had the same group go through for two years. Now we have a brand-new group of ten staff members who are going through the student agency training as well. They get to work with Mike multiple times a year. Amy and I continue to work with Mike, but in a different role. We might go to some different PD sessions, work with other schools, do stuff like this, phone calls, podcasts, other pieces, that make us the best version of ourselves at our job, but also let us impart that to everybody else.

By having my ten teachers, and then the next ten, over time we hopefully have almost the entire staff go through that same training. But it’s also our kids presenting. Every time they’ve done something, whether it was year one or year two of these interviews, they have presented it to the staff. An extra added piece of that is the student-led restorative practices.

We’ve had several students trained in that. In my idea, it’s more of a mindset of students being able to solve their own problems. But to the average person, it’s going to look like students working with their peers to solve problems, almost like a council in a school or a peer mediation group. The training itself has students walking away knowing that they’re in charge of their life and that they can help others. It definitely increases empathy. There’s the amount of self-reflection those kids go through. Talking with the ones who have been sitting in those rooms, watching kids be moved to tears by some of those trainings, is part of that.

So we’re continuing on the student agency path and making that a main professional development focus here in the building, but also continuing to have our kids go through it, whether it’s analyzing more data or the student-led restorative practice training, giving as many kids at-bats as possible. That was our shift this year. We kept asking the same kids to go to every single thing. We keep asking kids to go to all these trainings. So the shift this year is that we need new faces. We need new kids who maybe have not always had that opportunity. It would be awesome to have the majority of the student body go through some level of session or training that’s more than just an info session.

It’s an experiential piece where they’re up out of their seats and they’re learning. As we go forward, we had kids go this summer up to Columbus, and we’re going to have more go up to Mount Vernon in a couple of months. So we’re continuing to add to the student leaders, and it’s not just juniors and seniors.

These are freshmen and sophomores. We’ve had eighth graders train before, and that makes a huge difference, because now we have fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids who feel like they can be leaders in the building.

Connecting Student Agency to Career Goals

Rebecca Midles: I’ve heard you say that you got your staff trained in phases, and now you’re making it more inclusive with students too, bringing them in. You have staff ready to receive it, which is great. How does student agency show up with the workforce work in the community?

Kyle Scott: That’s a really good point. That goes back to letting our students have some level of choice in what they’re doing. Our kids as sophomores take the Future Plans assessment, and that provides them, essentially, their aptitude along with their interests. Then they meet with a coach virtually after they have those results.

It’s somebody else, not necessarily in our community. It could be anybody in the country who walks them through that, but also tries to help them ask the right questions and think about what they might want to do with the rest of their life. I always tell the kids, “I got really lucky. I like school, so I stayed in school, and I’m still in school.” Not everybody else enjoys their career at this point. Some of their moms and dads, some of the people in their lives, don’t enjoy going to work, and that’s rough. If you’re going to do something for thirty, forty, fifty years, you want to make sure that you like it, that it’s meaningful, and that it gives you some type of intrinsic feeling to get up in the morning.

And part of this, I think, is that if we have kids who have an interest in something but also are good at it, aptitude tells them that they can succeed, great. You can want to be a doctor all you want, but if your skill level isn’t going to match that, that’s going to be rough. It could be the same way. You might want to be an electrician or a plumber or a carpenter, but if your skill level doesn’t match that, that doesn’t make sense. Or maybe you think you want to be an accountant, but you don’t really know what that looks like until you get there. We have people who graduate and go into those types of jobs. We have people who want to be teachers, and then they get here and they’re like, “Oh, this wasn’t for me.” What if your junior and senior year provided you the at-bats and the information to know whether that career was right for you or not? That was part of my motivation in getting to that point. I’ve seen a number of people, whether in school with me or in education since, who have made poor choices and got to the point where they didn’t enjoy their job, or they wasted time and effort, or spent four years at a school and then changed their major their last semester.

You hear those stories. I’d like our kids at Warren to not have to worry about that. I want them to come out of high school with the best idea possible. We want to do the most that we can.

Rebecca Midles: What I also hear you saying, in terms of student agency and workforce, is that you’re helping surface their interests and goals. I don’t know that you exactly said this, but I think you’re implying it, so I want to give you a chance to say it if it’s true: if their goal is this aspiration, it now gives some more authentic motivation for the work they’re doing in school.

Like, how can they increase their skill set to match that aspiration? Did you want to say something about that too? Because I think that’s where you were headed.

Kyle Scott: Yeah, 100%. I think it was at the freshman orientation this year that I spoke to some of these pieces and told everybody, “Hey, you might not be graphing a parabola for the rest of your life, but you might be doing X, Y, and Z the rest of your life.” Finding a way to see the value in what we do here, and connecting those careers and aspirations to the classes we have in-house, is a really big deal, and that’s a challenge in some of our subject areas.

But that’s a piece that I would love to see shift in education in general: whether it’s math or language arts or any of the core subjects, we find a way to incorporate a little more of the career tech side of things so kids can see that these subjects have value, and that every job and every piece out there can be connected to them. You just see too many kids who are nodding off in class and not taking it seriously. We will still have that. There will always be that. Some will not be motivated until the right person comes along to help them become motivated. But I do believe this trend has helped us and will only continue helping us.

It also reinforces staff growing and learning, being lifelong learners, and that the way we teach every subject doesn’t have to be the same five years from now as we do it now.

Designing Flex Friday for Every Learner

Rebecca Midles: How do you ensure your design was deeply inclusive, and how did you integrate comprehensive special ed programming into the fabric, the DNA, of this learning environment?

Kyle Scott: Perfect. When we created our Flex Friday schedule, part of that, as I said before, was making sure our juniors and seniors could get into their career tech labs during the day while also allowing our freshmen and sophomores to go through their core classes. We designed a system where the freshmen and sophomores, for a three-hour period, went through their four cores. But it wasn’t their normal class period, and it wasn’t their normal teacher. They were all mixed in. We had all of our ISs and our core teachers available at the same time, while our juniors and seniors spent three hours in a career tech lab. Roughly half, in year one, did that on campus versus internships, externships and job shadowing off campus.

Part of that idea was also differentiated instruction. When this group all came to the math department, we had all of our math teachers available, and we had all of our math intervention specialists available too, so they could split kids up. They could group them how they wanted based on the needs that they had. That was a very ambitious goal at the high school level. I spent time as a fifth-grade teacher, and I also spent a year as an elementary administrator. Those are the types of things you see in first- and second-grade classrooms every single day. I have never seen something like that at the high school level outside of an intervention specialist room. But then you’re not really differentiating quite the same way if you’re trying to meet the highest of the high and the lowest of the low and also reinforce tier one instruction.

In some ways, we hit our mark on that beautifully. In others, it just did not work. Some of the negative aspects were that students complained they didn’t have their normal teacher. Not everybody did. Teachers complained that they did not have their normal students. Grading became difficult, because the expectation was that we didn’t take grades on that day. It was enrichment or intervention time for our freshmen and sophomores, so that became a little bit difficult.

The most beneficial piece was for our students who had 504s and IEPs, who were struggling, because that gave them small-group or one-on-one instruction with somebody in that department that day, and we did see a lot of strides. We compared our OST data and saw that those groups did move up. Our gap closing really did happen that first year, and it was awesome to know that those kids got serviced properly. I would say there was probably not a huge effect on the rest of the students.

Another piece on that day, which was awesome, was that after that block time, we had what were called passion classes. They were mini electives that we tried to make as career-based as we could, that our freshmen and sophomores took, and we had great ones. All of our career tech teachers had something in their department, and most of the kids in those classes were kids they didn’t see during the day, so it intrigued those kids to maybe take those classes the following year. Some of our teachers had classes like life skills or firefighting, or something as simple as creative writing or crafting or pickleball, fun things that kids like or might find useful, that made Fridays look different.

Our juniors and seniors, all the data that we collected last year showed us that they loved having basically every other Friday to work in those career tech labs or be off campus, and we had a ninety-nine percent attendance rate. Our freshmen and sophomores’ favorite part was those passion classes. So going into the second half of last year, when we were starting to get the data, when we went through the second round of student interviews, and we were listening to what the teachers said and the BLTs were meeting together to formulate a new schedule, it was, “We have to keep the passion classes. The freshmen and sophomores really like that. We have to keep the career tech labs. We have our teachers doing the best stuff possible in this community right here, and they have the resources to bring people in. That worked awesome. But we also have to keep those internships, and we want as many of those days as possible on Fridays.” So that was the thought process when the new schedule needed to be created.

Getting Staff Ready and Keeping Culture Positive

Rebecca Midles: You did a lot of focus on really radical design around student voice. For this next section, I want to talk about how you get staff ready, the conditions and the capacity. You surfaced a little bit about what teachers needed and how you’ve rotated them through the training piece, and maybe where their voice can be recognized.

How did that show up in the way that you did Flex Fridays? You gave a little bit of an inclusion about the interest-based options that students had. Where was the matching teacher voice on that? And then how do you maintain a positive, innovative culture when you have a staff going through that kind of change, which, like you said, is vulnerable? What were your strategies?

Kyle Scott: From day one, the very first BLT that we had when I took over in this position lasted almost an entire day, and culture was a big piece of that. The year before I got to this position was a little bit tumultuous. There were a few different changes in the district, and that left the staff feeling a little angry, a little bit unsupported, and wanting support and wanting to be heard. That’s what I tried to provide, and I took their thoughts and feelings. Through that year in designing that schedule, the first round, there was a lot of support. They saw the value in those things. I think even the naysayers were very quiet at first because they didn’t think it would actually happen. They did not believe that we would unveil a new schedule. Things had happened in the past where schedules were going to be changed or radical new ideas were going to be implemented, and every time in the last ten or 15 years, it never happened. It always got stalled. Somebody put a stop to it, whether it was the principal or the superintendent or whomever, right? And we were going full steam ahead.

So we didn’t get any pushback until April or May, when I told the staff, “This is happening. This is official. Next year we are doing Flex Fridays. Next year we are going to a seven-period schedule. Next year we will have this.” That’s when a few people started to question whether electives would suffer, because there weren’t going to be as many class periods. What would that look like for course offerings? What would happen?

Now, my leadership team was all on board, but they can’t get to every nook and cranny in the building. So it was going to some of those people and explaining the thought process, explaining how it would benefit them in the long run, while also acknowledging that there was a possibility of cons. I tried to weigh the pros and the cons in every facet of the building to come up with that. We all knew that we had created a system that no one else had. This is different. We’ve talked to schools in Columbus and Cleveland and a school in Colorado on how we were going to make this look. We didn’t do the same thing as anybody. It was a brand-new system that had never been created. Of course, something was going to go wrong, and it did right off the bat. We had questions before our first Flex Friday last year as to what that would look like, and we continued listening to what the teachers said.

But it was a delicate process in terms of giving in to what they thought they needed or wanted versus sticking to the course. There were people who wanted to pull the plug, and there were people who wanted drastic change in the middle of the year, and I kept saying, “We will not revisit full-scale change until at least this semester.” By the time we hit the semester, we didn’t need full-scale change. We just needed a few little things, like making sure that certain students were in the right PLB or certain students were with the right teacher, or something along those lines. But we knew that we had to change something going into this school year. We had enough feedback by February and March, through student interviews, through TBTs, through BLTs, that everybody knew that something had to change.

How Flex Friday Works Now

Kyle Scott: It was actually our career tech team that kind of gave in a little bit. I’d created a schedule that essentially had half-hour class periods on Fridays going into the school year, where freshmen and sophomores went through their normal classes, but juniors and seniors did not have to attend.

They would be exempt from that time period, but at the end of the day, they would have their career tech lab, and then our freshmen and sophomores would go through their passion classes and then a little PBIS reward time. To make it work to get longer class periods, the career tech team gave in and gave some of their minutes on their lab back to the rest of the building for their seven-period schedule, to ensure that it was worthwhile. So this year now, we have 40-minute class periods on those Flex Fridays. Our freshmen and sophomores run through their seven-period schedule. They get their teacher, they get their class, they get everything they normally do. Juniors and seniors do not have to be here during that time. Some of them will show up.

That’s inevitable. Some will need extra help. Our staff who have junior and senior class periods during the day then co-teach or get pulled in to help in other areas. For example, our chemistry teacher will go to physical science. Our algebra two teacher will be pushed into algebra one. Anywhere that’s logical like that, and that works really well. And for the principals and superintendents out there, on our passion classes, on the career tech side of things, we have found that we can code some of those as career tech classes, depending on whether it’s our program or the career center’s program. So we did find a little bit of additional funding there, which helps. We know with the state of things and the tax situation that every dollar matters, and we’ve been able to find a few thousand dollars here and there through those career tech classes, which are really cool.

And then there’s the added PBIS piece. High schools are notorious for not being positive enough and just relying on discipline. So now we have a nice half-hour PBIS time basically every other week that kids can be rewarded with. On a half Friday, we have ice cream ready to go. We have our staff serving, and we’ll have music in the commons area, and we’ll have a little bit of fun before the end of the day. Another piece is that our students plan the PBIS reward time. Our National Honor Society is in charge of that, and they will be planning all of the events for the entire year as opposed to our staff doing it.

Resources

Warren High School
Human Restoration Project
Building Bridges to Careers