Succeeding and Belonging
The Shaker Heights Schools Innovative Center
for Personalized Learning was once known
as an alternative for students who didn’t “fit in.”
Today, thanks to strong leadership and lessons
learned, it’s where many students choose to be.
By Jennifer Kuhel
Photography by Gus Chan
Every Wednesday afternoon a small group of high school
students from the District’s Innovative Center for Personalized Learning
gathers to attend a special meeting called Team Fortitude.
For most of last school year, they met via Zoom, joining the meeting
one at a time, cameras and microphones on, waving hello and flashing
smiles to a team of adult advisors who are there for one purpose: to
connect with the students.
Each meeting starts with an ice breaker like “if you were stranded on
a deserted island for a month, what three items would you want to have
with you?” The ice breakers are innocuous enough, but they also put each
student in the frame of mind to share, to engage, and, over time, to trust
the adults with the often heavy discussions that follow.
“We wanted to bring together mentors and students to have a kind
of intergenerational space where people can connect and bond and laugh
and talk about real issues,” says Matt Simon, the Innovative Center’s
coordinator. “Many of these students are kids who don’t tend to turn on
their cameras in other spaces, but they turn them on in this space because
they feel seen and valued. That alone is an important step in the IC getting
closer to the kind of community that we’re trying to be.”
The Innovative Center, better known as the IC, is a program for Shaker
Heights High School students who have found that the traditional high school
environment doesn’t work for them academically, and, in some cases, socially.
The IC offers blended learning (a mixture of online classes and in-person
support) and personalized educational programming designed to meet
students where they are and to help them find their own pathway to success.
The IC, which opened in the lower level of the Stephanie Tubbs Jones
Community Building in 2014, has for the most part functioned quietly in the
shadow of Shaker Heights High School. But today, thanks to a combination of
the strong leadership from Simon and Shaker Heights High School principal
Eric Juli, seven years of lessons learned, and a pandemic that uncovered
opportunities for improvement, the IC is making a name for itself as a space
that’s defined by student success and a sense of belonging.
A meeting of Team
Fortitude at Shaker
Heights School’s
Innovative Center for
Personalized Learning.
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