Cabell County Schools – An Incubator of Best Practices

Over the last decade, the Cabell County Board of Education, with the continuing support of

taxpayers, has taken steps to build the capacity of the school system in order to become a model

of best practices both statewide and nationally.

Cabell County Schools has leveraged the power of partnerships, working with state agencies,

higher education, and education innovators such as the International Center for Leadership in

Education and the Organizational Health Diagnostic and Development Corporation. Through

these collaborative efforts, we are better developing leaders within the school system, and

teachers are now out in front, creating an effective learning culture for our students.

At the same time, the Board of Education, the staff and the taxpayers of Cabell County have built

six new schools, redesigned our high schools, reinvested in the middle schools, and have joined

as a community to prevent students from dropping out early. We are realizing continuous

improvement system-wide, and have even achieved an increase in the number of students who

graduate.

Now it is time to turn our attention to making our schools self-renewing entities where students

develop an ethic of excellence. We want students to become active learners, scientists, urban

planners, historians, and activists; investigating real community problems and collaborating with

peers to develop creative, actionable solutions. Our schools must become places where learning

is active, challenging, meaningful, and public; places where school leaders, teachers, students,

and families have high expectations for quality work, achievement and behavior.1

In the next year, we are partnering with Marshall University, the Harless Center, and community

resources like the Heritage Farm and the Huntington Museum of Art to design a new kind of

school. This school will fully engage students and will ask them to bring personal excellence

into the equation of learning. The approach is called Expeditionary Learning, and it has proven

to be highly successful where it is in operation in schools in several other states. We believe this

incubator school, a consolidation of Geneva Kent and Peyton Elementary Schools, will become a

place of new ideas and practices in teaching and learning that can be shared and replicated.

There seems to be general concern that this culture of achievement has not been fully developed

as one of the core beliefs of our current generation of students. It seems that many of our

students are not exposed to the value of personal pride in their work and the perseverance it takes

to grapple with giving your best, creative effort.

One of the most important elements of an Expeditionary Learning school is that students become

members of ‘the crew.’ Every student learns to bring their very best to the school environment

where they are no longer passengers, but members of the crew. This crew concept is intentional

and students and staff talk about and develop these ‘personal best’ behaviors every day. In the

1 Expeditionary Core Practices: A Vision for Improving Schools

end, we will see students who are great thinkers, deeply engaged in learning, and able to produce

quality work that is relevant and public.

This new school, located at the old Beverly Hills Middle School site, is slated to open in August

of 2015. The staff will be selected in the next few weeks and will participate in extensive

training over the next eighteen months. But our journey only begins when we open the doors in

2015. It is our vision that this school will become an incubator of best practices for schools in

our district as well as schools across the state and region.

We are excited about what is going to happen for our students. We invite you to join us in our

quest for an ethic of excellence. You can visit our website at www.cabellcountyschools.com to

watch our progress and learn more about our incubator school.