Choice Campus at Centennial will open in August with one main goal: getting Lawrence high schoolers to graduate, one way or another, Lawrence school district Superintendent Jeanice Swift said.
The program will be available to students looking for an adaptable learning environment.
Students will work with their counselors to create a flexible schedule, and staff will help connect them to internships or jobs based on their post-grad goals.
Students could be in session for five hours, for example, and also attend classes at other schools in the district part-time. They can access those schools’ athletics and extracurriculars.
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The district previously had an in-person, nontraditional program called Lawrence Alternative High School, which closed in 2005 as the district opened Lawrence Virtual School.
Susie diZerega worked at LAHS from 1995 until the closure and taught English, mainly American Literature, which was a course required for graduation. DiZerega’s students had to complete every assignment on the course syllabus at a “C” level or higher.
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LAHS students came to the program for a variety of reasons but all had something in common: a traditional classroom learning environment wasn’t serving them, diZerega said. Many students were not scheduled to graduate on time, so LAHS offered small classrooms with individualized instruction and accommodations. Choice Campus at Centennial, 2145 Louisiana St., will take a similar approach.
DiZerega said teaching at LAHS was extremely rewarding. Her biggest takeaways were “having a new group of students arrive low in confidence and behind in their credits, then helping them through their journey toward successful completion of my classes” as well as “watching their self-esteem and confidence grow.”
She said she was pleased to hear the district will reintroduce a nontraditional option, but she’s surprised it took 20 years. She said the district had told teachers it was closing LAHS because the two traditional high schools, Free State and Lawrence High, received at-risk funding from the state to absorb those students. Plus, the district was rolling out LVS.
“I felt very strongly that closing LAHS was a terrible decision,” diZerega said. “I was very saddened at the thought of future at-risk students not having an alternative school option. I worried that their needs would not be met and that many more would drop out and not graduate from high school.”
Swift, who came to the district in 2024, said she has experience with nontraditional high schools from previous districts she worked in.
She hopes the program will help students be proactive about their learning by expanding their options.
“Students, I think, by sixth grade, know themselves, and we see this is a time where students and families will hear about the program and go, ‘Pick me. That’s my school,’ rather than a student having to go to the comprehensive (traditional school), be unsuccessful, and then come back around,” Swift said. “That might still happen, but I think it really is much more about students knowing themselves and choosing a style of learning that fits them.”
Choice Campus is also not primarily meant for students who are credit-deficient, Swift said. Students can accelerate their credits, too. Like LAHS, students and their families will choose the choice campus — not be required to attend.
The Lawrence school district does not yet know how many students the campus will serve or how many educators are needed to run its new nontraditional high school, but Swift said it will not be “staffing dense.”
“The numbers aren’t quite as important, because students come and go — not every student’s on campus every day,” Swift said.
Building on the old, bringing in the new
The former Centennial School closed to elementary students in May 2003. It housed LVS at one point in the aftermath. Since then, it’s partly been a practice site with batting cages for the Lawrence High School baseball program as well as other athletics.
In October, the school board voted to hire architect firm ACI Boland Architects for $211,200 to design and plan construction at Centennial, where the Choice Campus program will be held.
Swift said the district anticipates hiring a principal by spring break, which begins March 13, and then forming a small team to iron out the details. After gauging student interest, the district will onboard teachers as needed over the summer.
The introduction of Choice Campus at Centennial as well as other capital outlay projects — such as an expansion to Langston Hughes Elementary School and the addition of preschool classes at neighborhood schools — came about 2-1/2 years after the board voted to close Pinckney and Broken Arrow elementary schools as part of budget cuts.
Still, Swift said the district is well positioned to bring in this nontraditional high school. She does not yet know what the operational costs will be, but she said it doesn’t require a teacher per classroom the way an elementary school does.
“We are funded by student head count, as you know, and we also do receive at-risk funds, so this kind of very small boutique program can be run with a very small team,” Swift said.
The district is still evaluating whether daily breakfast and lunch will be offered, but it’s likely. The building will not feature a typical classroom setup. For reference, Swift said the inside might look similar to a Panera Bread cafe.
Renovations have not yet begun, but Swift said the district is currently in the process of clearing out some storage and making assessments. She said the building will likely be ready for an open house in the summer.
Students, staff, families and the public can ask questions or provide feedback on the school and other topics related to the district at a series of community meetings Swift is hosting this spring. Find those dates, times and locations in this article.
Online surveys for general feedback are also available on the district’s website at this link.
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Maya Hodison (she/her), equity reporter, can be reached at mhodison@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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