Every first and third Monday of the month the schools in Duchesne City release their students an hour early to give teachers a chance to participate in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) — teams of teachers organized to improve education.

“We focus on students during that time,” Duchesne High School Principal Stan Young said. “And, it’s been beneficial.”

Young, who has worked at the high school for 32 years, serving as principal for the past 11 years, admitted that he was concerned when he originally presented the idea.

“My worry was, at first, that the staff would feel that this was one more thing for them to do. They were already working on the benchmarks and mapping,” Young said. “I didn’t know if I wanted to throw this at them.”

Mona Farnsworth, a language arts teacher who coaches speech and drama, suggested that Young worried unnecessarily.

“We happen to be a staff who works very well together,” Farnsworth said. “So when the idea was presented, we went to our own rooms and decided about possibilities. We got back together and talked about what might work and what might work better.”

What seems to have worked is using the time to meet with other teachers as well as with students and occasionally parents.

“Primarily what we’re finding is the number of failing kids is significantly down,” Young said.

This success seems to be related to the advisory system that the two hours a month has allowed the school to establish.

Each teacher and several of the staff have 12 to 15 students that they are responsible to track each week.

“They look at them on a weekly basis and instigate the five levels of intervention,” Young explained. “Our basic push for PLCs is that we want to reach kids and identify struggling kids very early and we want to intervene often.”

Schools are required to meet for 990 hours a year. Releasing students early two days a month meant that the time had to be added onto other days. Since the buses in Duchesne accommodate the high school and elementary, both schools had to be on the same schedule.

“We work well together,” Young said of his counterpart, Duchesne Elementary Principal Guy Coleman. “And parents have been very supportive. I haven’t heard anything negative. There might be some out there that I haven’t heard, but it hasn’t made it to me yet.”

Farnsworth doesn’t have anything negative to say about the program. In fact she is very positive about how the time has opened up dialogues between the teachers as well as between students and teachers. Still the English teacher wants to include career studies and other opportunities for students during this time.

“That is another step we would like to take,” Farnsworth said.

But more than anything, Farnsworth would like to use the time to meet the unique needs of every student.

“Humans are not going to fall into a factory mode,” she believes. “We can’t just pump them out. If you want a better car, you can fix the factory. To get a better student, you have to meet that individual’s needs.”