“Power Hour” is Eastern Montgomery High School’s innovative scheduling of the lunch hour that is making time, not just for eating, but for tutoring, scholastics and a flurry of activities like yoga, archery, weightlifting and drones.
Eastern Montgomery High School senior Levi Bower assists freshmen Kelton Bridger, Ella Hopkins and Caitlin Wilcher assemble drones in Monday Drone Club.
The activities are as engaging and diverse as the students themselves.
More importantly, that unstructured 30 minutes seems to provide a breather in the middle of a young person’s crammed schedule, building time management skills, and a focus on productivity.
“First and foremost, this [Power Hour] was created for academic purposes to try to help students be successful during the school day and not put a requirement to stay after school when they don’t have transportation,” Principal Danny Knott said.
Tutoring and clubs are often held after school, but many students at EMHS have no transportation or have obligations like work, childcare and sports after school.
“We’re not geniuses,” Knott said laughing. “We came upon this like all good educators. Somebody else was doing it, and we borrowed it.”
He happened to read an article over summer break called “A powerful idea for a productive student lunch” on the National Association of Secondary School Principals web site.
He contacted Assistant Principal Matthew McDaniel to consider how the significant shifting of school culture, schedule juggling and increased student freedom weighed against the real explosion of possibilities that could come with an extra hour of time: tutoring, social engagement, physical exercise and just more choices in students’ lives.
“We’re very excited about it. For years our teachers have been asking for something built into this schedule to help kids with tutoring and remediation needs. We were never smart enough to figure out how to do it,” McDaniel said.
They came across an article.
“I fell in love and sent it to him [McDaniel] while he was on vacation,” Knott said.
In the Power Hour, 60 minutes of lunch is chopped into 30 minutes for lunch, then, remarkably, students are given a choice: to either just stay in the cafeteria or student center, attend tutoring or participate in one of 22 clubs. Yoga is popular, and there are newspaper, environmental science, guitar and chess clubs.
But would it work? Would kids value their time or roam the halls directionless?
On a rainy Monday lunchtime, Knott and McDaniel, armed with color-coded club schedules are traveling down shining, nearly empty halls.
No kids are wandering or loose, although in a fit of bad timing, a pile of boys tumble out of the bathroom into the shoulder of Principal Knott.
“Where are you supposed to be?” Knott asked.
They knew, and they went.
At first, many were like wallflowers at a dance, at the beginning of the semester, many students didn’t know what to do when the bell rings, but now says Knott, they’re taking advantage of the 30 minutes.
McDaniel says this kind of opportunity for developing time management skills prepares kids for life after high school.
He and Principal Knott emphasize that, whether it’s college, a job, or the military, you have to do something and “lying on your mother’s couch” is not an option.
The school is divided into four “homes,” one for each year, each has a central space with coffered ceiling bannered with quotes like “success is the sum of small efforts repeated daily.”
Famous quotes and good advice line the walls. “Kindness costs nothing,” and “Actions have consequences.”
Every message seems tuned to engage. At the door of each classroom, the teacher’s alma mater is posted at the door.
“This is where I went to college – Virginia Tech—Ask me about it!” one read.
Inside, the school’s scholastic bowl team is practicing, tackling Pythagorean theorems, The Battle of the Bulge, and questions like, “In a sequence of Fibonacci numbers, beginning 1,1,2,3 and so on, what is the interquartile range of the first eight terms?”
The team scrawled answers directly on the white board desks and calls out their answers.
Before Power Hour, the team would have met once a month. Now, it’s every Monday. Prom and Beta, a scholastic civic club working with Habitat for Humanity and organizing blood drives meet frequently enough to plan meaningful events.
Swinging by Ms. Bissey’s math-tutoring class where junior Haley Howard and senior Desarae Johnson are prepping to re-take a catastrophic trigonometry test. They don’t have to be there.
“It’s not like you get punished,” Howard said. “You get punished with no knowledge.”
Surrounding the smart screen and the equation to be simplified are quotes and vows: “I will listen,” “I will follow directions” and “I will be honest.”
Even younger students appear to be respect the time they’ve been given in the middle of the school day.
Eastern Montgomery High School students Eric Shrewsbury, Shae Davis and Emily Chitwood are camera-shy, but bold about walking club, saying walking and talking with your friends is better than sitting in the cafeteria. The school’s new Power Hour schedule has introduced 22 school-day clubs and tutoring.
The walking club is in the gym on this rainy day, about 10 kids, a bunch of boys and a bunch of girls, are strolling under the hoops.
Sophomores Shae Davis, Erica Shrewsbury and Emily Chitwood, in cowboy boots, glossy hair and giggles, are walking and talking.
All three agreed to do Walking Club together. Asked why they chose walking, they seem annoyed by the very notion of time wasting.
“Walking Club. It’s something to do,” Shrewsbury said. “Like, most people just sit in the cafeteria and talk to friends and do nothing, when you can walk and do the same thing. So, it’s better off to walk than just sit in the cafeteria and do nothing.”
Then Power Hour is over. The bell rings and, in the hall, Justin Beiber is singing “Baby” on the intercom.
For almost 300 young people, Power Hour at Eastern Montgomery High School is an exercise in self-determination, choice and freedom in a safe, controlled place full of good advice and encouraging quotes.
“From what we’ve seen it’s working,” McDaniel said, standing in a noisy hall full of purple hair, hoodies, braces and pop music. “It gives us an opportunity to tutor and that was our initial goal. And the students really seem to like it.”