The Marietta High School Student Life Center was created to raise the graduation rate in Marietta City Schools. SLC lore centers around a meeting between founder and then-MHS principal Leigh Colburn and the MCS School Board. It was 2013, and the graduation rate was a dismal 67 percent. The Board of Education at the time wanted to know what it would take to raise the graduation rate, and Colburn quipped, “Build me a dormitory.”
A lifelong educator, Colburn knew outside challenges affect student performance inside the classroom. Students who were experiencing homelessness, poverty, substance abuse, or a myriad other issues were unable to give school their full attention. Grades suffered, students fell behind, and they rarely caught up enough to graduate.
Because building a dormitory was out of the question, the Board tasked Colburn with finding a way to mitigate these outside influences on student achievement. She could have looked to the literature to see what researchers recommended or gathered a room full of experts in their field to decide what to do, and she did those things. But she took it a step further and asked the students themselves, experts on their own lives, what they needed for success.
Colburn started with graduating seniors, but she also surveyed students who weren’t going to make it to graduation. She recognized the need to understand the successes and obstacles faced by all students in her building, even those who had fallen too far behind and were not going to catch up before they aged out. These students were asked to pinpoint where things went off the tracks for them and what the school could have done to help them get themselves back on course before it was too late.
As Colburn’s team evaluated responses from these two groups, patterns emerged that helped them put together a five-page survey for the 2,500 students in Grades 9-12 beginning the following school year. More than 1,600 surveys were returned, and those responses informed the portfolio of services that made up the original Student Life Center, then called the Graduate Marietta Student Success Center.
Funding was simple. As student needs were uncovered, Colburn went out in the community and found a community partner who could fulfill that need. The Center was housed on the MHS campus, and service providers came to MHS to meet students there. Early services included a writing lab, clothes closet with laundry facilities, food pantry, college and career counseling, and the Good Vibes Cafe, a favorite student hang out spot.
There was office space onsite for counselors available to help with addiction, sexual abuse, domestic violence, anger management, and general mental health needs. Counseling was paid for by grants, private insurance, and Medicaid. There were support groups for students with addiction, anger, grief, and incarcerated family members. There was a group that supported teen moms which provided mentoring and baby supplies.
In the very early days, DFCS and a juvenile court probation officer had desks at the Center. Tutors were available all day, and students who were given out of school suspension could serve their suspension at the Center with tutors there to help them keep up with their school work as they served out their punishment.
It was a rousing success. In its first three semesters, the Center provided MCS students with $3.4 million in resources and services. Tutors logged more than 10,000 tutoring sessions and suspended students clawed back more than 600 instructional days. An average of 25 students used the clothes closet and laundry services each day, and the food pantry distributed more than 8,000 pounds of groceries each month.
The school system ran a second set of buses on scheduled days so students could take advantage of Student Life Center services after school without having to worry about transportation home.
We, in Marietta, have become so accustomed to the awesomeness of the Student Life Center that we forget how incredibly innovative it is. There was nothing else like it: a mashup of school and community services, public/private partnerships. In 2016, the Georgia Charter Systems Foundation named Marietta City Schools its Innovator of the Year for the work the Center was doing in our community. Leaders from across Georgia and around the country visited the Center in hopes of bringing similar services to their own communities.
Perhaps the most innovative thing about the Student Life Center is that it is designed to be adaptive. Colburn and her team called the survey process “gathering Student Voice,” and the idea was to survey students every school year and adjust the portfolio of service offerings to meet each new generation of MHS students. It’s an ongoing process that is meant to be repeated year after year, and as the years went on, the Center adapted to student needs.
For that reason, and by design, the MSLC—before the BOE cut its services last year—was not the same place it used to be. It had adapted to student voice all these years later, as it should.
Marietta High School’s graduation rate in 2023 was 86.4 percent, a vast improvement on the paltry 67 percent when the SLC was founded. Much of that success can be attributed to an ethos of meeting students where they are and giving them the support they need to make it across the graduation stage.
Most of the programs that were offered are gone now, squandered by a radicalized school board that is out of tune with Student Voice—a BOE intent on injecting culture war politics into MCS business.
In upcoming posts, we will detail for you just how much things have changed and what our community has lost with the gutting of MHS’s Student Life Center.