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Technology is key at new Nokesville school
Patriot High School is ready for opening day."Every day, stuff gets added," said Mike Bishop recently in his office at the new Nokesville school. "Ninety-nine percent of everything that needs to be here is here."
Sure, during a guided tour in late August, some of that "stuff" sat in cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic on top of a wooden loading panel in a hallway.
Football coach Brud Bicknell mentioned then that his team was still waiting on training weights for the state-of-the-art weight lifting facility that were supposed to arrive weeks ago.
In the end though, that's small-picture stuff before classes begin on Sept. 6.
This isn't like the last time Bishop helped open a school when, he recalled, staff still had to wax the floors the night before students arrived.
Instead, Bishop's late nights over the last year consisted of almost 600 teacher interviews, some of which didn't end until after 9 p.m.
After all, he needs enough teachers to accommodate 1,631 kids. About 20 of those teachers came from either Brentsville District High School or Battlefield while others were hired out of Woodbridge and Osbourn Park based on voluntary transfers.
In all, Bishop hired about 85 teachers out of 110 total school employees.
Roughly 700 students are coming over from Brentsville while 500 transferred in from Battlefield. That is designed to help relieve overcrowding at both schools and still doesn't include a senior class for Patriot.
Parents of those students will be able to keep up to date on their kids' grades via weekly emails if they so choose.
"The parent gets a real-time picture of what's going on," said Bishop.
Huge fluctuations in scores are not supposed to come from missing assignments either, according to Bishop.
"We don't give zeroes at Patriot," he said. "Essentially, you're going to have to turn your assignment in."
Instead, students that miss assignments are themselves then assigned to homework detention in order to finish up.
Bishop based this line of logic on real-world experience. For instance, if a company asks an employee to do something and that worker does not complete the task, the assignment can't remain incomplete if the company wishes to keep its customers happy.
"We have an expectation that you'll succeed," said Bishop, emphasizing the idea of "accountability."
"We're trying to put that into school. I'm a big believer of trying to bring 21st-century learning into the classroom," he added.
That sort of learning does not end at ethics and guidelines either.
"Now we have cell phones that kids don't read the directions for," said Bishop. "That's self-directed learning."
For parents wondering what good their kids punching away all day on mobile phones will actually do for them while they're still in school, consider this: the classrooms are digitized now.
Bishop walked into one classroom to show off what's called a Promethean wall, which is basically like a virtual whiteboard. Teachers can conduct class and conduct real-time, on-the-spot quizzes during which students must answer questions with a hand-held device.
Answers then appear on the board and if someone didn't answer -- say the person holding Remote No. 9 -- the instructor will automatically know someone is falling behind.
Out of the 117 classrooms in Patriot, 107 come equipped with a Promethean wall.
It's part and an interactive mindset Bishop and his faculty are bringing to Patriot in which modern learning techniques are being used in an area that used to be more known for cow pies than a rural haven for defense contractors.
Other schools do have Promethean walls and others surely have courtyards or stationary exercise bikes in the "media center" (a more up-to-date version of the library), or flat-screen high-definition televisions with wireless technology designed for four students to work on projects together, or an auditorium with listener-assisted devices.
But Patriot has them all.
The lunch room is designed in a big, circular space with cafe-style tables and chairs instead of just long rectangular benches (which still exist). Even the desks in the classrooms are specially designed to accommodate both right-handed and left-handed people while at the same time able to serve as an extended table when grouped together, almost like putting together pieces of a puzzle.
"I wanted the desk to reflect the learning environment," said Bishop.
Not every classroom needs Promethean walls and perfectly designed desks, however.
Patriot offers a slew of electives or specialty programs designed for students to earn college credits.
There is an advanced placement (AP) scholar program, one for culinary arts, another for building, one for engineering and one more for early childhood education.
Bishop said he noticed a gender divide in two of the electives, with girls opting heavily for early childhood education and boys leaning toward building. Yet the culinary arts program is more equally divided and the engineering class actually has more girls than boys so far.
In the culinary arts program, there is an introductory class with 80 students broken into four classes and two sections of culinary arts I with 20 students signed up for each.
"It's amazing. It's incredible," said chef Emily Stevenson, the culinary arts instructor as he stood in the learning kitchen, basking at the technology around her.
Patriot, she explained, is more equipped in the kitchen than even her college alma mater.
The biggest challenge ahead, she said, is just allowing the students to get to know the facility here and how to use it so they can receive their certifications.
According to Bishop, all the technology, advancement and top-of-the-line facilities are meant to send a signal that Patriot is simply equipped to adapt to the modern world.
"I think the biggest thing getting people to understand is that we're going to do things differently than at other schools," he said.
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