Untraditional school helps Wisconsin students’ mental health


High school sophomore Sophie Thunder has ADHD. She’s gone to many different schools as her family tried to find one that accommodated her needs.
“It wasn’t good. I didn’t feel safe at all. The teachers never believed me,” Thunder said of her previous school experiences. “They always thought I was just lazy. If I told them I couldn’t do something, they would say, ‘well, you could do it yesterday.'”
Thunder transferred to DCA Connect last year. The school is a part of Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a charter school that serves Wisconsin students in kindergarten through 12th grades, mostly through online classes. DCA Connect, in Green Bay, also has in-person options for students on a campus that houses several business partners, allowing students to learn from onsite job shadows and mentors from their potential future professions.
The assistant principal of DCA Connect, Josh Rankin, said traditional, brick-and-mortar school works great for some students. But, for others, it doesn’t.
“Our range of students runs the gamut of all kids, some who have just really busy lives, some with a real kind of life responsibility, like teen parents and traveling athletes who need more flexibility,” Rankin said. “We also have students with mental health issues where going to a brick-and-mortar school causes a lot of anxiety, so we’re a school where kids can still have a high school experience without some of the distractions that have taken a huge toll on their mental health and well-being.
“All students are unique and different, and to have an opportunity to school in a way that is beneficial to individual students is really valuable.”
August Servais, the school’s engagement mentor, said DCA Connect uses a variety of practices to help students like Thunder. Although students are typically expected to attend the online classes, which meet regularly, the classes are always recorded so students have the opportunity to watch lessons on their own time and complete their assignments.
Although staff encourages students to keep up with their work throughout the semester (and each student has a learning coach to facilitate their efforts), assignments are often accepted right up to the end of the semester so students have more flexibility in completing their work.
“If we find that students are going awhile without doing assignments, we’ll reach out to say, ‘what’s going on?’ and find a way to help them,” Servais said. “But if there are a few days where a student is unable to do their work or they have complex health situations that make it difficult, we have an attendance line they can call into, or they can even just reach out to their teachers to say they won’t be in class.”
Because of that increased flexibility at DCA Connect, Thunder is confident that her teachers trust that she’ll do her work when she can, and that when she needs accommodations, she’s free to take them. That trust is vital to Thunder as she feels she has more control over her learning.
“It’s easier for me to focus on classes online because there are less distractions that way. And, because I’m hard of hearing too, when teachers put questions in the chat, I can actually follow what’s going on and answer questions,” Thunder said. “When I do have a lot of classes, I don’t have to sit in one spot. I can take my computer outside or tell my teacher I need a break and walk around the house or something; I don’t have to just sit there for two hours.”
‘I feel like I belong here’: Building relationships in a more flexible school setting
Sal Kilgore, a junior at DCA Connect, has a medical condition that requires accommodations. At his previous schools, he felt like his teachers didn’t believe he was disabled because it’s not always obvious from just looking at him. He started at DCA Connect for the 2024-25 school year, where he feels like he’s both accommodated for and trusted by his teachers.
“Here, if I need to leave, that’s OK; it doesn’t become a huge thing of yelling at me. And that makes it easier for me to open up about my condition and explain what’s going on, and the people here are like, ‘I understand that’ instead of, ‘you’re not sick,'” Kilgore said. “At my old school, I felt like they didn’t want me there, and that made it hard to get up in the morning, but here, the relationship is way stronger, and I can tell they want me here.
“I feel like I belong here.”
In a 2021 study published in the Australian Journal of Psychology, researchers reviewed several studies about the psychological importance of a feeling of belonging, which was defined in adolescents by Carol Goodenow and Kathleen E. Grady as “the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment.”
The authors of the 2021 study concluded that, “Just as harbouring a healthy sense of belonging can lead to many positive life outcomes, feeling as though one does not belong is robustly associated with a lack of meaning and purpose, increased risk for experiencing mental and physical health problems, and reduced longevity.”
Rankin and Servais said fostering a sense of belonging is a vital part of their school’s mission — especially important since so many of their students have experienced feeling excluded by their teachers and classmates.
At DCA Connect, Rankin said, Tuesdays and Thursdays are typically class-heavy days, while Mondays and Fridays are more flexible days with laidback seminars, project work and group meetings. Those more-flexible days enable students “to build intentional community” and relationships, which are vital to fostering a sense of belonging — which can be more difficult in brick-and-mortar schools when “there are 800 or 1,000 students coming in, sitting in 50-minute classes and then all rotating to their next class at the same time.”
Servais said that even in the school’s biggest classes, such as an 80-student online business class, there are opportunities for relationship-building among smaller groups of people; when students struggle with an assignment, they can let their teacher or learning coach know, and smaller virtual chats are set up, “with two people in a room, figuring it all out together.”
Many students are motivated to form those connections themselves, but there are plenty of students who are more reserved (which is especially common for students who are new to DCA Connect).
“Relationship-building for those students looks like more emails, more texts, more calls to their learning coaches, just to make sure they know support is there and available for when they eventually warm up,” Servais said. “If they want to form a connection, they will eventually identify us as safe adults, and if they’re not wanting that higher form of connection, they’ll still know we’re there to back them up.”
While many of these connections are built through online platforms, several students take advantage of coming to in-person sessions at DCA Connect, especially on days when their online classes don’t meet.
Kilgore’s medical condition is exacerbated by stress; he said he had flareups every day at his previous school because he was “stressed out and scared to go to school.”
“Now I’m getting less flareups because I’m less stressed out, and I try to be here as much as I can,” Kilgore said. “I haven’t been this like, ‘yay, I’m going to school!’ since I was a kindergartner.”
“I don’t know how to explain this, but coming to school now feels like how a big hug feels.”
The importance of seeing ‘the why’: Student-centered approaches to foster engagement
Another reason Kilgore and Thunder trust their DCA Connect teachers more than the teachers in their previous schools is that they feel their voices are heard in choosing the path their education takes.
At the school, every student chooses a pathway in order to take classes, shadow businesses and join mentorships or apprenticeships related to the career that most interests them. Current pathways include business management and administration, information technology, agriculture and natural resources, construction and engineering, health sciences, and law and criminal justice, although Rankin indicated pathway options can grow depending on student interest.
“When students start here, they tell us the things they’re interested in, and we work with them to develop their curriculum according to those interests,” Rankin said. “This very student-centered approach is the future of education, in my opinion, not the exact same education system that has been established for decades and decades that everyone needs to take the same classes.”
Authors Katie Novak and Catlin R. Tucker posit in their book, “UDL and Blended Learning: Thriving in Flexible Learning Landscapes,” that student choice is not only desirable but necessary for students who are growing up in a technological environment where learning is usually self-directed. When students can easily access answers to questions through a quick Google search or YouTube tutorial, “it makes sense that everyone involved in education takes a step back and reevaluates what we are doing and why we are doing it.”
The authors continue, “At the core of this new vision for teaching and learning is a realization that the learner must have some control over the learning experience for learning to be relevant, engaging, and meaningful.”
Tobi Paramo, a sophomore at DCA Connect, said students sometimes ask their teachers about possible job shadowing opportunities, which are then set up for them. Kilgore mentioned field trips to tour businesses, noting that seeing the day-to-day reality of different careers helps students to visualize their possible futures, to see “what it looks like when you’re on the job.”
“When I was at a brick-and-mortar school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the future because I didn’t know what was possible,” Paramo said. “I would just be focusing on graduating high school instead of focusing on my future. But here I know how many opportunities I have.”
Students in traditional schools can also benefit from student-centered approach
Although some students need the flexibility that a virtual or hybrid school lends to protect their mental health, students in more traditional, brick-and-mortar schools can also benefit from taking classes geared toward their interests and future career goals.
The Racine Unified School District started an academies model at several schools in 2016. High school students choose career pathways (or academies) that interest them, and take classes geared toward those interests; they also participate in apprenticeships and mentorships, as well as take classes for college credit or job certifications.
Alexander DeBaker, the Academies’ executive director, explained that their goal is to customize students’ classes to make them relevant to their future careers; that way, when students are sitting in a math class, for example, they’ll be more engaged because the lessons will relate to specific skills they’ll need in the future.
In other words, they’ll understand why they’re taking the classes they’re taking; “this generation isn’t shy about wanting to know the ‘why,'” DeBaker noted, laughing.
Allyson Betker, who teaches in the Academies’ business and marketing pathway at Racine’s Park High School, said her junior students take classes on marketing principles and digital marketing; as seniors, they learn retail and social media marketing strategies. The school also has an Educators Credit Union branch where student apprentices have the opportunity to work during their lunchtime.
“Everything is completely live. Kids can open student accounts, cash their paychecks; we’ve even had someone take out a car loan over lunch,” Betker said. “And the students can also get release time to work at the branch during the day. They work from 11 to 1:30 Monday, Wednesday and every other Friday, and they finish out their weekly hours at a regular branch outside school hours.”
DeBaker and Betker also noted that breaking down the student population into smaller academies improves feelings of belonging, especially since students in the same career pathway have interests in common.
Betker said that one day, she was substituting for a teacher in the technical services pathway, and there were students coming in and out of the classroom all day talking about their robotics and automotive interests.
“I messaged the teacher and asked if these students coming in and out all day was OK, and he said, ‘oh, yeah, that’s normal,’ Betker said. “They have the same interests, and they enjoy being around each other, so they’re always coming to these classrooms when they have time during the day.
“They feel like they belong and can be part of something. They have a passion for the same stuff, which is great. It’s kind of like they’re their own little family.”
Contact Amy Schwabe at (262) 875-9488 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @WisFamilyJS, Instagram at @wisfamilyjs or Facebook at WisconsinFamily.
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