The Atlantic – Jackie Zubrzycki
“Last spring, Chris DeRemer, a geography teacher at Manual High School in Denver’s Whittier neighborhood, found out his district was considering opening a new middle school in the same building as Manual. While Denver Public Schools’ enrollment is growing quickly and the district is pressed for space, most of the first floor of Manual’s three-story building is used by administrators, not students. The high school also has no middle school directly feeding into it, which has led enrollment to drop steadily in recent years. But filling that space with preteens and a brand-new middle school would inevitably change Manual’s academic and social environment. “For [the students] to not have a voice in that, that was not okay,” DeRemer said. DeRemer decided to use the district’s plan as a teaching opportunity. He outlined a project for his Advanced Placement Human Geography class, aimed at fulfilling course goals such as reading and interpreting data and defining regions.”(more)