SALEM – Being awarded up to $400,000 from a man who’s name is synonymous with innovative success is a sizable responsibility.

It is one that educators at Mt. Abram High School in Salem are happy to embrace.

Last week, Principal Jeanne Tucker and SAD 58 Superintendent Quenten Clark learned Mt. Abram would receive up to $400,000 over the next five years, thanks to funding through the Great Maine Schools Project, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Although Maine has one of the highest high school graduation rates in the nation, fewer than half go on to college and only one-quarter of the state’s population holds a bachelor’s degree.

It is the vision of the Great Maine Schools Project, which doled out $10 million in grants statewide, to give students skills to succeed in college and the workplace. The project is part of a move toward statewide reform, by using the Promising Futures initiative, in high schools.

Tucker said he is confident the initiative will help Maine lead the nation in high school reform. It is outlined in a 70-plus page handbook that offers tips for teachers to get students more involved in learning.

A community school

With the Gates grant, Tucker hopes Mt. Abram will become a community school, with flexible hours, extra distance learning opportunities, additional parent and community involvement and more personalized learning plans for students.

Because SAD 58 covers 600 square miles and stretches to Canada, it’s important to make its only high school accessible whether it be on site, over the Internet or via video conferencing equipment.

“We’re trying to push the boundaries of time and resources. We cannot say ‘no’ because we’ve never done it that way before. We need to find new solutions to old problems,” Tucker explained.

Grants will be used to “bridge the distance,” he said.

The vision

After the grant expires, she and other members of the school’s visioning committee, teachers Peter Manning, Carolyn Bremer, Angel Allen and Kirsten Brown, imagine a school with no dropouts. The average dropout rate is 5 percent.

It’s a school where community members are common in the classrooms and students make connections to the community, whether it be at a senior citizens home recording oral history or taking water samples at a local pond.

Eventually, adult education classes will be housed in Mt. Abram instead of the superintendent’s office 10 miles away. There will be tech training for displaced mill workers and college classes for students who need an extra challenge.

Perhaps the school will have a Parent Teacher Organization, Tucker imagines, which can chat over the wires with video conferencing equipment that will be at the elementary schools in each of the district’s five towns.

It’s a school that works for its 300 students, and in return, those students make a lifelong commitment to being engaged learners and good citizens.

“We truly want to leave no child behind,” Tucker said. “Our students’ educations and their future careers are the lifeblood of their communities.”

For Clark, the Gates grant is a seal of approval for his district. “I think it’s an affirmation of the great work they’re doing,” he said.

Bill Gates has a vision of reinventing high school for the 21st century and Mt. Abram is on the same page, he said.

“Schools in this area have started to develop a vision, and the Gates foundation believes in this vision. They wouldn’t have given Mt. Abram this is they didn’t think this was a good place. And they did.”

sdepoy@sunjournal.com