Kingston High School opens its doors in less than a year, and parents are still wondering what to expect from their children’s experiences there.

Under the direction of former Interim Principal Bruce Saari, KHS was originally slated to open with a small learning community (SLC) format, dividing the students into three smaller schools within the building. Each SLC was designed to reflect different specialty focus areas.

But after Saari’s retirement earlier this year, the district backpedaled slightly, as chronicled in North Kitsap School District Superintendent Gene Medina’s June letter to the editor in the North Kitsap Herald. Medina’s letter stated the need to involve KHS’s new principal in decision making, and increase the district’s communication with community members.

Now new KHS Principal Christy Cole is providing some answers. Some form of small learning communities is still in the school’s future, but exactly what they will look like is still up in the air. Currently, Cole’s focus is on the SLC practice of creating strong student/teacher connections.

“The way I’m envisioning things happening is that it’s going to be groupings of kids with teachers, and that will grow over time in terms of what specificity each program will have,” Cole explained.

Cole is not new to the district, having left a position as assistant principal at North Kitsap High School to come to Kingston. While at NKHS, she oversaw Polaris, an SLC within the larger high school.

Although nothing is out of the question for the future, she said, at this point no decisions have been made beyond grouping. Grouping means connecting smaller numbers of kids with a core group of teachers. At present, groups will not be distinguished by special interests, largely because of time constraints and the amount of work that still needs to be done to prepare a new school to open. Cole described these initial groupings as more a function of scheduling than of interests.

“As time moves on, perhaps the school community, the parents, the students want to take it even further than that,” she said.

But even possibly moving to a specialized SLC format in the future won’t necessarily look like the three groupings planned during Saari’s tenure, which was detailed in a North Kitsap Herald advertisement earlier this year.

“I think over time that the programs are going to develop,” Cole said. “There was a point last year when there were proposals for small learning communities. There are no hard and fast plans to implement what was laid out in the paper.”

What the future program will look like will be created with community input, Cole said. She wants school staff, parents, and kids to have an ownership in that decision process.

“We plan on having a lot of meetings so parents are in the loop, in terms of when things are happening, what the instructional program’s going to look like.”

Cole also envisions KHS with a very active parent community. As soon as the building is cleared for occupancy, she hopes to start having parent meetings at the site.

Staffing the new school is already underway. Teachers have received their school assignments on a tentative basis, depending on how enrollment shakes out across the district. The KHS staff has met once, and will begin having more frequent meetings in November.

“The excitement in the air is palpable. There’s a lot of enthusiasm,” Cole observed.

Teachers – already busy at their current schools – will be meeting often to plan for next year. Sticking to the mission of strong teacher/student relationships, Cole envisions a very positive first year for students.

“We want to have education personalized for the kids. We don’t want the students at Kingston High School to feel like they’re an anonymous number running through the school … We want the students to feel cared about when they walk in the door; to feel welcome; to feel a sense of purpose and place.”

Cole is already busy connecting with students. She has been visiting in the Kingston Junior High lunchroom and in ninth-grade advisories, getting a head start on meeting future tenth-graders. Next spring she also plans on arranging some KHS tours for upcoming students.

For next year’s senior class, Cole and NKHS Principal Kathy Prasch are keeping in mind the difficult split students will be facing. As a great portion of the class of 2008 will be attending KHS their last year, a student committee will be formed to plan activities to keep the connection between the two schools.

“I think that the kids who go to Kingston High School as seniors, a lot of them are going to have ambiguous feelings toward it,” Cole said. “They will have gotten to know the students at North, yet there’s the sense of adventure and excitement about being in a brand-new school. I think there are going to be some kids that their loyalties are torn. We have a lot of kids that are very, very excited, though, about going to Kingston High School and being the first senior class.”

The school itself is on-schedule, 80 percent complete, and coming along nicely, she said. KHS will have about 800 students, compared to NKHS’s enrollment of about 1,200 (enrollment at NKHS is currently about 1,400).

Even without electricity on, Cole says that in daylight the building is filled with light.

“It’s a beautiful building. It’s airy, it’s gorgeous. The sunlight comes in from the upper story, and the way the architects designed it, it comes down to the first floor.”

The design was actually created to easily facilitate an SLC format.

“I think Kingston High School is going to be so beautiful and such a wonderful program, a wonderful addition to the Kingston community,” Cole concluded. “I think it’s just going to be a gem.”

More information on Kingston High School attendance boundaries, visit www.nksd.wednet.edu or call North Kitsap School District communications director Chris Case at (360) 779-8703. Information on the Polaris program and small learning communities is available by linking through the North Kitsap High School Web Site at www.nksd.wednet.edu/schools/nkhigh/SLC’s.htm. Interested in being on a KHS parent committee? Contact Principal Christy Cole at (360) 394-2623.