Photo by Jon Anderson
Vestavia Hills schools Superintendent Todd Freeman speaks to the Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce at the Vestavia Country Club on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023.
Vestavia Hills public schools are ranked second in the state on performance assessments, but there is so much more to learning than just academics, Superintendent Todd Freeman told the Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce today.
The chaplain for the Vestavia Hills High School Student Government Association was speaking to teachers recently and thanking them for what they have taught her, Freeman told the 140 or so people who attended the chamber luncheon at the Vestavia Country Club.
“She didn’t say a single thing about ACT scores or about STEM [science, technology, engineering and math],” Freeman said. “She talked about empathy and respect and learning to be herself, how to have confidence in herself, perseverance. We have a broader picture in our schools of ways we can help our students experience what learning is.”
Freeman said he could think of no better example than Jesus’ teaching in the New Testament to “treat others the way you want to be treated.”
Vestavia Hills public schools focus a lot on teaching character and core values, Freeman said.
“We value everyone, and we want to make sure everyone is taken care of,” he said. “What’ we’re trying to do is simply to take what our families believe and what our community believes and bring it to the school and reinstill and reaffirm what we know is important.”
The key core values the school system teaches are excellence, family relationships, honesty, integrity, perseverance, love, acceptance, service and respect.
One of the ways they do that is through philanthropy — giving without the expectation of any return, Freeman said.
An Advanced Placement U.S. history class the past two years has collected 4,400 books for needy homes and schools in west Alabama, he said. Vestavia Hills students also have donated 20,000 food items, volunteered to work with Rise Against Hunger and raised $230,000 for the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center and $61,000 for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation of Alabama, he said.
Students at Vestavia Hills Elementary Cahaba Heights are learning by building relationships with senior adults from the New Merkel House, including kindergartners who work with the senior adults in their “kinder garden,” Freeman said. “We can learn a whole lot when we cross our generations,” he said.
Sometimes, extra measures are needed to help students who have life circumstances that can bring challenges, Freeman said. Most classes have some students from low-income families. The average elementary class will have two students with asthma and two students with high levels of anxiety, Freeman said.
“We want to saturate kids with healthy relationships” to aid them, whether that be with their teachers or the district’s 13 school resource officers, 16 school nurses, 20 counselors, one social worker or two behavioral analysts, Freeman said.
Vestavia Hills Elementary West has a facility dog named Merlin, who can sense when students are sad or having a rough day and need a companion, he said. Merlin is a wonderful asset, but it would be even better if the district had nine facility dogs so there could be one at each school, Freeman said.
While educational outcomes are important, Freeman said he agrees with Alabama football coach Nick Saban that the focus should be more on the process than the outcome.
Vestavia Hills educators are trying to listen to students about what they like to do and leverage that with what they need to know. About 70% of graduates from Vestavia Hills High School go into the STEM fields or business and finance, so teachers are looking for creative ways to make learning about those areas come to life, Freeman said.
Sometimes that involves sensory gardens and robotics. Steven Brooks’ design, engineering and architecture class did a project to try help a young boy with a physical hand issue more easily open and close his baseball glove. They brought him into the class and made a three-dimensional mold of his hand to try to find a solution for him, and that real-world experience made their lesson more meaningful, students said in a video that Freeman shared.
Vestavia Hills High School also partners with the Academy of Craft Training to immerse students in construction trades if they have such an interest, Freeman said. Some students go straight into those fields, while another recent graduate said she used that experience to better understand those trades before she goes to college to study engineering and design, he said.
An entrepreneurial program at the high school teaches students how to develop a business proposal through a business incubator competition. Twenty-eight students are enrolled in that class this semester, Freeman said.
The most transformative thing that the Vestavia Hills community can do to help educate students is to invest in teachers, Freeman said.
“Our teachers are our difference makers in our schools. They can get us to our outcomes,” he said.
At the beginning of the school year, he likes to tell teachers that they have about 30 million minutes to change the lives of children, he said.
Vestavia Hills has a very talented group of teachers, Freeman said. Of the 549 teachers, 77% have a master’s degree or higher, and 64 are certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, he said. But it’s getting more difficult to recruit and retain teachers, he said.
The school district needs to make sure teachers have a principal they love and enough pay, resources and professional development to make them want to stay with the school system, Freeman said.
The investment in the community is not just about money; Freeman said. It’s about people in the community giving of their time, experience, intellectual capital and skills to help breathe life into the education of students, he said.
Freeman said he greatly appreciates the many community partners the Vestavia Hills school system has but invited them to think about opportunities to do more.
He quoted Horace Mann, an American educator from the 1800s, who said “No community should rest contented with being superior to other communities while it is inferior to its own capabilities.”
