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Turnaround Team Scrambles at Ky. High School

Shawnee High School teachers, from left, Pamela Dixon, Kristyn Williams, Charles Wade, and Tiffany Clements let go of yarn that they tossed to one another during a professional development program held last month in Louisville, Ky.

—Pat McDonogh for Education Week

Kentucky school's staff members gird for High-Stakes Changes Come Fall

By Lesli A. Maxwell

A few weeks before a new team of teachers was to report to the former Shawnee High School in Louisville, Ky., Principal Keith Look discovered the master schedule for the 2010-11 school year to be in total disarray.

More than 100 Shawnee students—all of them juniors and seniors—had been enrolled in classes with no connection to the credits they needed to stay on course to graduate on time. Mr. Look and a team of three others spent nearly two weeks rewriting the schedule from scratch, scrutinizing, transcript by transcript, every 11th and 12th grader’s record to make sure the students were placed in the right courses.

But even with corrected schedules, Mr. Look realizes, those students still may not graduate on time, putting them at a...