Hudson High School is part of a systemic district-wide K-12 commitment to education all students as active, responsible citizens.  

In addition, Hudson High School was recently moved to a brand new building which has been designed, with input from students and the community, to provide lots of asymetrical
classroom and community physical space to make collective deliberation and dialogue more effective.

Since 1993, Hudson has made enormous strides in civic learning, particularly in giving students a bigger voice, says principal John Stapelfeld.  (A video featuring Hudson High School as a "laboratory of democracy can be seen at 

http://www.edutopia.org/civics-education-video.)

Service-learning and "clusters" keep students connected to the community and to the school, a particular challenge for a rapidly growing student body.  Teachers are also given the time and encouragement to take on responsibility for major activities in the school. 

 "When a teacher has a major responsibility," says Stapelfeld,  "it just adds to what we can get accomplished."    

CURRICULUM
Engaging the community in learning has long been part of Hudson High School's program.  For instance, the physics class re-created high profile experiments and took the demonstrations to housing projects and nursing homes.  Students instructed the audience on the science involved, and everyone participated in the experiments. 

In the band class, high school and middle school students invited all the musicians in the community to rehearse with them.  The school-community band puts on three performances a year.  

As far as formal classroom instruction, Hudson's civics program includes the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum and American and World history courses.  The classes frequently feature "Why?" questions, which require students to think and write critically.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
A number of different professional development approaches complement the civic learning skills students are developing.  To encourage class discussion, professional development focuses on deliberation and facilitation techniques. 

When Hudson incorporated peer mediation into the building, it also offered professional development on how to support the student mediators. 

For service-learning, the superintendent and an advisory team offer considerable support to assist teachers in developing community service projects that involve the community as well achieve as an educational goal.  As staff turns over, Hudson updates its professional development.

In addition to staff-wide professional development, Hudson sends small groups of teachers to training sessions sponsored by Facing History and Ourselves, Freedom Forum in Washington, DC ("one of the most worthwhile experiences for developing student voice that we've been involved with," says Stapelfeld) or to another sponsor of the teachers' choice for curricular development.  

Professional development is also available if Hudson stumbles across a school district that's had great success with a particular activity.  It will send staff to sit down and talk to them about what they do and how to adjust it to fit with Hudson.  "We are not adverse to taking others' good ideas and putting them ideas into our building," says Stapelfeld.

STUDENT VOICE
In addition to aligning Hudson with the First Amendment Project, the school's biggest achievement in civic learning was an initiatve that started about five years ago.  At that time, the student body population was growing rapidly ("for us, 1000 students is fairly large," says Stapelfeld).  How could they create meaningful student engagement in a school that was getting larger?

Hundson struck on a method to divide the school into smaller groups so educators would be able to identify disenfranchised students more quickly, as well as have meaningful discussions with students and give them a voice.

Hudson created four interest-based clusters:

• Technology, Engineering and Business
• Science, Health, and the Environment
• Communication, Media, and the Arts
• Public Service, Policy, an Education

Both staff and students select a cluster (which has no impact on curriculum); currently, groups are about 125 students and 15 staff members.  The guidance counselor assigned to the cluster stays with students for their high school career.

Once a week for sixty minutes, clusters get together as a group and plan activities to carry on schoolwide.  In this way, students are able to have increased visibility and a bigger voice. 

Clusters also make it possible to discuss schoolwide issues in a meaningful setting.  For example, the cluster model has facilitated discussions of school service, dress code, accountability for cluster time, and the school system's firewall. 

To better get a handle on the issues, clusters divide themselves into smaller interest groups of ten students.  "That's where the real work takes place," says Stapelfeld.  For example, if the cluster is part of a small interest group discussing food service, whoever is facilitating the small group will draw out what exactly students are not happy with, what would they would like to see, whether they would like to visit another school...

It is interesting, Stapelfeld says, what happens in a school culture when you tell students they have a voice.  "As soon as the journalism class started up, the students wanted to know where I stood on editing the newspaper.  I had to read up on Supreme Court cases about students' rights in school (for instance, the Hazelwood Decision) -- civic learning requires research.  Teachers also had to accept the fact that we hear from students, we don't just direct them.    

"And students also have to understand it's okay to make a statement: food service is lousy.  But, they also need to understand it's important to explain where they're coming from.  What are their recommendations? What is needed to change?"
 

Eventually, Hudson changed its food service providor and hired a new chef, a positive change that shows the cluster deliberation model is working.  However, it takes time, Stapelfeld concedes.  "We've been struggling with dress code for three years.  Democracy works slowly."