Owen Valley High School

As a High Schools That Work site, Owen Valley High School’s programs are constantly evolving and improving. Since affiliating with HSTW in 1995, OVHS’s culture, climate and conversations have changed, centering on preparing our students for a rapidly changing society. In pre-HSTW days, our fragmented and isolated faculty seldom left our individual classrooms or ventured beyond the building. Now, our reform trek takes many of the OVHS faculty to state and national conferences where we learn, collaborate, network, and present. Within our building, we frequently convene as a large group and in interdisciplinary teams to discuss research and to plan reform initiatives. Individually and in teams, we gather data and analyze it to gauge the success of our efforts and to use as a guide to further reform initiatives or revisions.

Data drives decisions in Owen Valley High School’s quest to attain the HSTW goal: improved academic achievement for all students through blending high-quality academic and vocational/technical programs. With this over-arching goal in mind, data from the HSTW Assessment, student and faculty surveys, and Indiana’s ISTEP exam dictate OVHS’s annual action plan. As a result, our entire faculty work within various focus teams to implement the action plan’s goals which purposely align with HSTW’s key practices. Our administrators use data from instructional audits, grade reports, surveys, and standardized tests as a means of providing a rationale and motivation for improving curriculum, instructional practices, and attitudes about teaching and learning. Data from our quarterly whole-school reading, writing, and math assessments direct classroom teachers’ instructional strategies and re-teaching efforts. Based on what data and research tell us about our students’ needs, large numbers of our teaching and counseling staffs have retrained in curriculum revision, cross-curricular reading and writing, student-centered instruction, performance assessment, advisement programs, and technology integration.

Data tells us that of OVHS’s 827 students, ninety-nine percent are Caucasian and fifty-one percent are male. While thirty-five percent of our middle school’s students receive free lunch benefits, only fifteen percent of Owen Valley High School students claim to qualify for free lunch.

More than half of our students’ parents commute to work in the larger areas of Bloomington, Terre Haute, or Indianapolis. The county’s three largest employers are the school corporation and two medical implement manufacturers: Boston Scientific and Cook Urological. Light
manufacturing, retail, government, and recreation comprise the remaining local employment sources.

Owen County’s economic and education statistics rank low in comparison to the other ninety-two Indiana counties. Our county ranks eighty-ninth in personal income levels, with nearly half of our families earning less than $25,000. Similarly within Indiana, Owen County ranks seventy-eighth in the percentage of adults holding a high school diploma.

Owen Valley High School - along with one middle school and four elementary schools - serves most of Owen County, which has a population of 20,600. To attend OVHS, which is located in Spencer, most of our students ride one of the forty-one buses from Gosport, Patricksburg, Freedom, Coal City or points in between. Daily, our buses traverse 1980 miles of Owen County’s roads.

Fifty-eight teachers, three counselors, one media specialist, two program coordinators, and four administrators support Owen Valley High School students. In several classes, our students practice critical thinking and problem solving via real-life, applied, project-based, and student-centered situations. Integrated units are developed for the students when teachers make links between courses. With our school-wide commitment to improvement of academic achievement, students read more and write more as part of their instruction and assessment.

Within OVHS’s 4 x 4 block schedule, students take four eighty-minute classes daily during each of four nine-week terms. Their daily schedule also accommodates a twenty-two-minute segment which is used twice weekly as an advisement period, twice weekly as an extra help period, and once a week as an activity period. This year, an intervention room has provided students with a problem-solving alternative to traditional discipline referrals. Many of our ninth graders enter our new high school transition program where they are taught in an academy format during each morning.

Improvements in curriculum, instruction, access to technology, and achievement have occurred despite the fact that Owen Valley High School has outgrown our thirty-year-old building by averaging 150 more students and ten more faculty members than we originally accommodated. As a result, seven of our teachers share classrooms, equipment and supplies.


HSTW's major goals include:

Raise the mathematics, science, communication, problem-solving and technical achievement of more students to the national average and above.

Blend the essential content of traditional college-preparatory studies mathematics, science and language arts with quality vocational and technical studies by creating conditions that support school leaders, teachers and counselors in carrying out key practices.

Advance state and local policies and leadership initiatives necessary to sustain a continuous school-improvement effort.