'My education got interrupted:' Lorain Schools offering night school for high school students

LORAIN — Korayma Rivera watched as her little cousin Josiel Lopez picked up brightly colored toys, placing them in the back of a plastic John Deere dump truck. It was less than a week until Christmas and less than a month until Rivera's due date in mid-January. Rivera already has a name picked out for her baby girl, Joriannic Yuliette. She says it with a smile, spelling it carefully. She's excited, she said, not nervous as she looks forward to meeting her baby girl. As the oldest of nine cousins, she is used to taking care of small children — often looking after Joseil, 3, who has ADHD and is autistic, while his parents are at work. The soon-to-be mom has a lot on her schedule, including taking one last test at Lorain High School to graduate. She looks out the window as rain turns to snow on a bitter December day, thankful she can drive herself to Lorain High School. Rivera, 19, is one of about 40 students attending Lorain High School's new night school, held 4-7 p.m. Monday through Thursday. It is for the young mothers balancing babies, jobs and coursework; for students whose education was interrupted or put on hold to help take care of sick family members or provide extra income to make ends meet. "I was not going to be able to come to school, I have a lot of appointments and I have two brothers I have to take care of also and I have a grandma, she started with Alzheimer's," Rivera said. "So when I heard about the opportunity, I was like, I think this is going to work best for me." For Success Academy Principal Nancy Lecorchick, there is no one type of night school student. "Korayma said it really nicely: 'My education got interrupted for a while,'" Lecorchick said. "It was a million things that happened in a very short amount of time, she didn't see it as she stopped or dropped out, it just got interrupted and we're here to pick up the pieces." The program started this fall after Lecorchick and teacher Elliot Nicely saw a need in the district that wasn't being met by the regular 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. school day. So they pitched the idea to the district and got the green light to pilot the program. Using Apex Learning's online coursework to catch students up, the program is akin to credit recovery already offered in Success Academy, which serves students with academic, behavioral and social-emotional learning needs. But it is done in a blended learning model, allowing students to complete coursework on their own schedules or in-person during night school. A lot of the students attending night school have missed days, weeks or months of classwork, Lecorchick said. And as they attend less and less, they fall further and further behind. "They were getting (further) away from us," she said. The first step to ending that interruption was meeting those students where they were — home visits, phone calls and the offer of gas cards to and from class. For Nicely, it was a response to students dropping out regularly. "We're no longer a 9-to-5 economy. The family structure has changed and evolved over the last 50 years, but the one thing that hasn't changed is traditional school," he said. "So as society changes and our economy changes we have to be more responsive in the way in which we create options for our families and our students. This is our attempt to be more responsive." This is Nicely's 25th year teaching, he said, and when he saw the posting for the night school position — vague as it was — he felt a calling to the post. "I felt like instead of just coasting through those final years this was an opportunity to undertake something that could be the most important thing that I've done yet," he said. It's a lean staff right now, just Nicely and Lecorchick spending their evenings in the classroom and days reaching out to truant students and talking to guidance counselors and family members. Mondays through Fridays the pair help with coursework. On Fridays, Nicely hosts office hours via Zoom, troubleshooting technical issues or any other questions that may arise. Most nights, they're building the plane while flying it. Referrals come in from other students — like Rivera, whose friend used the program to get her diploma after she had her first child — or through social workers and other staff at the school. For Nicely and Lecorchick, night school is a full-time job, because "these aren't part-time kids," Lecorchick said. "To do this, you have to do it," Nicely said. "This is something you have to be married to, this is not something you can flirt with. … When I'm not here I'm having conversations with the guidance counselors, I'm on the phone following up with parents, I'm doing home visits. Those pieces are incredibly important to maintain those relationships that make this program work." Many of their students are juniors and seniors with far too few credits to graduate. Some are fifth-, sixth- or seventh-year students. The Ohio Department of Education counts students who graduate in four and five years, but those who go beyond that are considered "nongraduates," Assistant Superintendent Ross May said. "When we studied our Success Academy last year, we interviewed all of our students in the program, and one of the things we learned was many of them indicated they would be more likely to participate in school and pursue graduation if we had a night school," May said. For Lecorchick, it is not about the metrics the district meets. It is about taking a chance on kids the system discarded. And sometimes, that means caring more about a student's education than the students do. During night school one evening, Lecorchick pulled a girl into her office after hearing she was going to drop out and attend Elyria Schools instead. Purshja Carter, 16, had gotten into a fight with her mom and was moving in with her grandmother in Elyria, with plans to enroll at Elyria High in its credit recovery program. But Lecorchick did not think Carter would attend Elyria Schools, as it had been a fight to get her in at Lorain. Lecorchick offered gas cards and called the girl's grandmother, nearly pleading with the woman on the other end of the line to keep her granddaughter in night school, where she had better attendance and had completed coursework. "We really try," Lecorchick said. "I don't know how else to say it that's meaningful." Not every student is a success story, but that doesn't mean Lecorchick is not willing to take the chance. Caring, love and compassion are not finite, she said. What is, is time. "So what happens is that when I call 20, 30, 40 times, when we go out to their houses and we try to find them, eventually (another student) is going to come and I don't have enough time to juggle both of them," she said. "But it hurts every single time you lose a kid." Sometimes they get a student to show up for three weeks or three months. Sometimes they get to the diploma. She said it wasn't hard to convince anyone in Lorain to bet on these kids, but outside of the district, some question why she does not just point those sixth- and seventh-year students in the direction of a GED. It's because they do not "do" GEDs, Lecorchick said. She would rather see students have high school diplomas. Dotting the fronts of file cabinets and propped up on shelves are pictures of Lecorchick with past students, all clutching diplomas or posing in their cap and gown. It is a trend she started after the pandemic when fewer students knew her name, but they knew their cousins, brothers and sisters in those photographs. They knew the young men from the south or west sides of the city beaming with pride, and Lecorchick hopes that seeing those familiar faces would give her a little more credibility when encouraging them to keep working toward the finish line. "They're always worth it," she said, glancing at those photographs. Korayma Rivera will become one of those success stories — and one of the first graduates of night school. She had missed a lot of days after her great-grandmother died last year and she had to help her grandparents. "I was going to drop out but then I was like no, I'm not going to drop out. Even if it takes another year I want to graduate," she said. "I want to get this out of my way." She thought about quitting again in May, but her mom pushed her to keep going, she said. Now, Rivera is looking forward to college, planning to study to be a medical assistant and a sign language teacher. "I'm hard of hearing and sign language was my first language that I ever learned — not English, not Spanish, it was sign language," she said. She plans to teach it to her daughter as well. She had expected pushback when looking at night school, but it was easy to take advantage of the opportunity presented, she said, no matter the hurdles she faced. Lecorchick agrees. Through the 20, 30, 40 times she and her staff reach out, it is about getting 100 percent of Lorain's students across the stage. "Some of our kids have a long way to go," Lecorchick said. " … I think what it takes to get a student who has not been engaged in school to finish, I think it's probably going to be my life's work." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.