Student with public mural. Photo courtesy of Dustin Hensley

Students at Elizabethton (TN) High School have built a locker room for the soccer team, painted murals downtown, and taught coding to elementary students—all as part of library media specialist Dustin Hensley’s Community Improvement course.

Students inspired the course in 2015, when they were asked what the high school of the future should look like, Hensley says. “They felt like they had been in the factory model of education for too long, and it didn’t really match what life looked like outside of the school,” ­according to Hensley. “They didn’t like that we’d created this false boundary between community and school” and wanted to remove that boundary, “because learning can ­happen anywhere.”

The school submitted a grant ­application to the XQ Super School Challenge and won $200,000 to create the course. The purpose is for students “to look at community and what that means,” Hensley says, and then empathetically identify and solve problems. How they help their community is up to them. Participation is restricted to juniors and seniors, in case there’s a need to drive to meet with project partners. Sometimes students don’t officially enroll because of scheduling issues but still come to the library to work on projects.

Since Community Improvement launched in 2017, students have done a variety of projects, including working with a psychology professor to create a mental health peer support group; creating a multi-year program to teach project-based learning to elementary students; and starting a book club through the local Boys and Girls Club.

Each semester, Hensley begins the class by asking students to name issues in the community. They then talk through those issues and suggest projects that could lead to solutions. Solo and group projects (no larger than three) are allowed. Hensley wants students to be “really cognizant of their own growth, and that’s how they actually end the course, presenting a portfolio dedicated to their growth and learning for the semester.”

The projects must meet state ­standards.

“I ask the students to really look deeply at their project and think, ‘How many different subjects am I hitting?’” says Hensley. For instance, painting a mural downtown could meet ­psychology and economic standards if it attracts people to the area. Students can see that “all of this learning is connected.”

One of the most important parts of the process is how students handle things going wrong.

“One of the best things for them is whenever they reach a standstill or a stumbling block or maybe even fail in their project,” Hensley says. “They’ve never had a safe place to mess up without having some type of demerit or a grade lowered.” Hensley notes that most “have never worked with a municipality before, never worked with red tape before,” and they learn how the process works. Roadblocks are good because they teach young people how to “accept failure and create a solution to come back and keep moving.”

His students have presented at ­multiple conferences across the ­country from California to Louisiana. It’s ­special, Hensley says, that “we’re in this tiny community in Appalachia that no one’s ever heard of before, and our students are being recognized for all the hard work they’re doing.”

The course has been such a success that the school is using grant money to expand the class, so that every student will have some type of ­work-based learning or community-engaged ­learning project in their senior year.

“It’s about to become much larger than just one class,” says Hensley.

Marlaina Cockcroft is a freelance writer and editor.