Arvada High School’s Empowerment Academy is an alternative education program for 11th and 12th-grade students that keeps a comprehensive high school atmosphere with small classrooms, high support, and clear expectations surrounding school participation and attendance.
For each quarter, students are only allowed 5 absences for that quarter or they run the risk of losing credit for the classes they are enrolled in. Attendance is crucial to their academic success, so being here on time and present daily is strictly enforced.
All students take a 9-week course on Social Emotional Learning before entering the program to work on skills that will promote community and a positive emotional state to get back into the swing of school.
Tyler Moyle has been in this program for about a year and agrees. “The discovery program really helped me build the social-emotional skills to help me further grow in my personal relationships and help divert from conflict.”
This program has proven to help every student come back to school, ready to learn. KC Jones who was also positively impacted by this program says, “I definitely think it’s showing how to handle stress in a better way. It tells you how to understand behaviors and how to manage that stress in healthier ways so you can get through school.”
Olivia Kotarba plays an important role in the Empowerment program, as the discovery teacher. She is one of the four teachers for this program and is very involved with her students. “I think one of my strongest assets as a teacher is the relationships I form with students before teaching.”
Kotarba was an English teacher and the varsity volleyball coach before she started teaching in the program. She has years of experience with building programs and turning them into a community.
Rachel Powell was the first teacher to teach empowerment. She was a social studies teacher but decided to switch her specialty because she “chose to teach empowerment because I already taught these kids in the past and I wanted to see them succeed.”
The empowerment program is a credit recovery program for students who are struggling with regaining missed credits.
A normal high school day is different for the students in this program. “They only have to focus on 3 classes at a time so they can work with those teachers, focus on those skills and they have an easier schedule since they aren’t switching schedules every day.” – Kotarba.
This is a small school system so kids have high support and low class numbers. They get a lot of attention on them with a strict policy.
Tony Bolda says, “The difference between normal class and empowerment for me is they make everything a lot easier and my pace. We work at our own pace and I don’t feel like I’m being rushed to do anything.”
The type of students the program leaders look at is someone who wants to turn around their educational journey, if the student doesn’t want it, it’s not going to work for them. The student has to prepare for a strict environment, lots of boundaries, and needs to recover credit.
“The last thing we look at is how many credits they need”. Santino Demot says “This program is definitely more of a tight-knit group, you stay in class with generally the same people every day so there’s more of a community to it”
Unfortunately, the empowerment program is frowned upon. Common misconceptions that the students in this program are just lazy bad kids that don’t want to go to normal school. But “the reality of it is it’s just for redemption, we come back to school because we want another chance.” Tony Bolda argues.
