Academy challenges, lifts up gifted high-school students, especially in science and mathematics

By John James Snidow

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. -- For being such a small part of the experience of everyday America, boarding schools have a pretty big hold on its imagination: Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Catcher in the Rye, Scent of a Woman — all this to say nothing of Harry Potter, the genre's apotheosis to full-blown cultural phenomenon.

They have their own lovable conventions, of course: good-natured rule-breaking, wizened (often wizardly) teachers that step into the roles of adoptive parents, and the espirit de corps formed during late nights spent prowling the halls of dimly-lit dormitories in search of intrigue.

And while these more “extracurricular” aspects of residential learning are probably what make the novels so endearing, it is the academic ideal of living in a community of bright, young, talented intellectuals that makes the boarding school, as a cultural icon, so enduring.

Of course, they do carry a certain image with them. Ask your average adult to free-associate about the term “boarding school” and you're likely to get a pretty standard list: Dark wood paneling, ivy-bound cloisters, stained glass, ties and blazers – in short, wealth.

And, when you think about it, this kind of secondary school experience – living and learning with like-minded, motivated peers – has traditionally been limited to America's uppermost social echelons, educating the Bushes and the Kennedys of the world but not the Carters and the Clintons.

That's where the Gatton Academy, left, comes in. Elite, residential, but totally free, this unique college-high school hybrid at Western Kentucky University has managed to give gifted teenagers from across the state an elite educational experience without the usual requirement of societal pedigree. Think Dead Poets Society without the angst about good breeding and class. Or, for our younger readers: Hogwarts without the wands.

The people who run the place have a much more down-to-earth vision. “Our firm belief,” says Corey Alderdice, Gatton's assistant director, “is that we are an extension of every school system in Kentucky.” While the academy's students are enrolled full-time at Western, their per-pupil state funding still goes to their home counties, they still graduate with their back-home peers, and any test scores or honors they receive accrue to their original high school.

When you walk into Gatton, the decor screams “science.” There are sierpinski triangles, this particular academy's coat of arms, engraved in the floor, and the rooms often feature dark wood paneling – but accented here with stainless steel rather than stained glass. The office of Tim Gott, Gatton’s director, is outfitted with a double-LCD-screened computer desk, and bookshelves feature texts on trigonometry, high-level physics and quite a bit of reading material on gifted education.

And gifted these kids certainly are. After all, Gott says, half of the academy’s incoming class scored higher than a 30 on the American College Test (ACT). As sophomores! For comparison, just 2 percent of WKU's regular undergraduates score that high – as seniors.

That makes for a challenging environment, says 2009 graduate Ben Messick of Ashland: “At high school I didn’t have to do much of anything, but once I got to the academy, my mindset was forced to really change.”

Memphis tycoon Bob Compton told the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce in July that he likes to play a game when he visits first-grade classrooms around the world. He asks children a pretty standard question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” In India and China, the answers are usually “scientist,” “engineer,” “mathematician,” and, occasionally, “doctor.” In the U.S., more common answers are “president,” “supermodel,” or simply “a celebrity.” Apparently that's a full-time profession these days. But he says no American six-year-old ever tells him that she wants to be a mathematician or an engineer. Ever.

Gatton Academy hopes to change that.

Kentucky ranks 42 nd among the states in the number of scientists and engineers. Other Southern states had the same problem earlier in this century, and several built academies like Gatton to fix it. Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina, to name a few, all have similar schools designed to modernize their traditionally agrarian economies. They appear to be working. Texas has been pumping out tech-savvy graduates for some years now, and 67 percent now work within the state.

This is especially important for a state of small towns. If you grow up poor in Harlem, but you're smart and motivated, there are countless charter schools, philanthropic organizations and minority educational programs geared to help you reach your potential. You're identified at a young age, mentored through the middle grades, and, if you work hard, you go to Stuyvesant or Bronx Science or Poly Prep, some of the nation's best schools, free of charge.

But if you're born to a poor family in Appalachian Kentucky, it doesn't quite work that way. There simply aren't the same kinds of programs to identify talented youth, and the school districts aren't large enough to offer these highly selective, specialized high schools to meet your needs. They just don't have the scale. But by leveraging the size of the entire Kentucky school system, this is exactly what Gatton has been able to do.

“It used to be that if you went to Manual or Dunbar,” the highly selective “magnet” schools of Louisville and Lexington, Gott says, “you had really good opportunities for advanced course work, but what Gatton does is provide that same opportunity to every student in Kentucky.”

Jared Mink, a second-year Gatton Academy student from East Bernstadt in Laurel County. (Photos by Clinton Lewis for The Courier-Journal of Louisville, where this story initially appeared)

In a Courier-Journal column several weeks ago, David Hawpe wrote that “the best news” about Gatton is that most of its graduates were staying in-state for college. But Gott and others don't see it like that; he says one of Gatton's supporters puts it this way: “I don't care if they stay in Kentucky or not for college. But I want them to come back because I want to hire them.”

That’s good, one recent graduate says, because about half of his classmates would like to attend out-of-state schools.

“Nobody says ‘I hate Kentucky and never want to come back’ . . . [Many] want to leave and see the world for a while before they return,” says Messick, now a student at Kettering University in Flint, Mich.

Inez banker Mike Duncan agrees: “You go out, you slay the dragon and then you come back home to help the folks.”

Gatton's corporate sponsors are a testament to its potential to revitalize the state's economy. While the school is fully funded by the state, companies like Toyota, Ashland and AT&T still give it tens of thousands of dollars each year. The companies invest in the Gatton kids “because they need them,” Gott says, and they “realize they might not have them if they don't invest.”

Gott makes a similar plea for public funds. “I like to think that we have a set amount of money to invest in Kentucky, and we have to decide how to allocate it,” he says, “It takes $35,000 per year to keep a person prisoner in the state of Kentucky. It takes 25,000 per year to educate a kid here at Gatton. I know we need jails, too, but this is certainly a better investment.”

And that's the idea – long-term, big-money, high-yield investment in the technical future of Kentucky's economy. Twenty-five thousand dollars per year for a public-school education is expensive – in fact, it's really expensive – and Gott knows that, but he says “If we invest in 120 kids, now, what will they turn around and give back to us? Dozens of jobs for them and their peers, economic development for their communities, tax revenues for 20 and 30 years.”

Messick says he hopes to do just that: return to his native Appalachia to pursue a high-tech business career.

For Gott, the real wish is not just that his students will return to take high-paying jobs, but to create them, and he says that Kentucky's rural nature is no hindrance. “If you're running a research lab, why not here? After all, Carter County is a great place to put a particle accelerator – lots of cheap, available land.” For the folks who support Gatton Academy, Kentucky's current rural, low-cost landscape is the perfect recipe for a tech explosion. Just add talent.

Gott says the biggest challenge right now is representation. Many Eastern Kentucky counties are not sending kids to the academy, as Hawpe noted earlier this year. The problem, says Hawpe, lies in the attachment that Appalachian Kentuckians feel to their homes. But that may not be the while story. While attachment to one’s home is Gatton's biggest hurdle, it is also its greatest strength. “These kids love Kentucky,” Gott says, “and we know that after they've been away for a while, they're going to want to come back and make it better. And that's good for everyone in the state.”

When I arrived at the academy to interview Gott, his staff told me I would have to wait for a moment because he was “doing some mopping.” When I interviewed him, he was dressed in khakis and a WKU polo shirt, and he told me that he tries to keep a “folksy” vibe both at the academy and in his leadership.

While elite, he says he doesn't want Gatton to be a pretentious place. Academy? Yes. Prep-school? Sort of. Preppie? No.

That’s why his from-memory recitation of T.S. Eliot caught me a little bit off guard. We were standing on the back patio, looking out on Western's lush summer campus, and he said that he hopes his kids will prove Eliot's lines from Little Gidding correct: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

And hopefully, for us folks back in Kentucky, they won't just come back and better know this place, but know this place — and make it better.

John James Snidow, a native of Ashland, Ky., and a 2009 economics graduate of Harvard College, wrote this story during his summer work for the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky. It originally appeared in The Courier-Journal of Louisville on Aug. 16, 2009. Reach the writer at Snidow@gmail.com. Reach Institute Director Al Cross at al.cross@uky.edu.