NEXT High School creates a new vision for education
NEXT High School started like all entrepreneurial ideas — with a vision to build something from nothing to solve a problem.
The plan came together when a group of entrepreneurs sat around a light pine conference table inside Greenville's NEXT Innovation Center and dreamed up the solution to what they saw as a vacuum of talented, risk-taking entrepreneurs in the Upstate.
"What if we could build a school from scratch, what would it look like?" Zach Eikenberry, a serial entrepreneur, recalls saying.
The answer, it turns out, will be the most progressive, radical school in Greenville County's — and perhaps South Carolina's — public education system.
If NEXT High School's operation turns out like its founder's vision, students won't wake up in the morning saying they're "going to school," says Joe Greenberg, a lifelong educator who is the school's program development director and fulfills the duties of a principal. The school has not named a principal yet.
"That's such an archaic term," Greenberg said. "School exists wherever you're doing your learning."
Students won't trek from class to class in nice 50-minute increments. They won't have lockers. They won't have many lectures.
Instead, they'll wake up in the morning working to solve problems. They'll have collaborative work stations rather than desks. They'll have mentors as teachers rather than lecturers. They'll spend much of their time in real working labs, in corporate offices with skilled professionals.
"Our goal is to be as much a non-school learning environment as possible," Greenberg said.
Around that conference room table, Greenville's technology-driven innovators realized they needed to create a new pipeline of talented youth to transform Greenville's workforce culture in a knowledge-based economy.
They wanted to foster a culture where taking risks was encouraged and failing spectacularly was OK, too, Eikenberry said.
And they realized they couldn't foster those entrepreneurs with just programs designed within the existing public high schools, he said.
NEXT has received its public school charter and is accepting applications through Oct. 15 for incoming ninth graders. It plans to open in the fall of 2015 with up to 250 students. School leaders are still working to finalize a school location, which will be announced later this year, Eikenberry said. The school previously announced it is raising funds to renovate the former Hollingsworth on Wheels plant as an open floor plan to create the collaborative model seen at the NEXT Innovation Center.
State pupil-education funds will cover operations, but the school has started a fundraising campaign to raise $18 million over six years for facilities and technology, according to the school's fundraising prospectus.
Entrepreneur demand
As Eikenberry speaks, a black-bound notebook with a few notes to guide his thoughts lies open in front of him next to his iPhone, which buzzes occasionally.
This school is an entrepreneurial venture for him, too. And as chairman of NEXT High School's board, he's solving problems as he goes.
Eikenberry grew up in Indiana, graduated from Purdue with a philosophy degree, taught for a year and started numerous businesses. He was a senior partner at FCD Inc., which consults with small businesses to seek and manage government contracts, and he's currently involved in a consulting role at the Growler Haus, a craft beer bottle shop in Anderson.
He's a thought leader who speaks at workforce development forums, and he spends most of his time consulting with pre-revenue, pre-market companies. He says Greenville has a budding entrepreneur culture, but it's still a pretty "safe" locale where most entrepreneurs aren't taking radical new approaches, he said.
He believes Greenville needs to change the narrative of what school is about to get to the next level of entrepreneurial growth.
And he praised the efforts within Greenville County schools to expand project-based classrooms and science, technology, engineering and math education at high schools like J.L. Mann Academy and Carolina High and at the middle school level with the opening this school year of Fisher Middle School on the campus of Clemson University's International Center for Automotive Research.
Students at Mann and Carolina learn through inquiry as part of the schools' New Tech programs, and teachers steeped in technology assist along the way. Those high school programs started this fall, but by the time students graduate, they will have completed internships or senior projects.
NEXT will take the idea of project-based learning to the next level, out of simulated labs and into the real world, Greenberg said.
The goal of NEXT High is "to save the entrepreneur spirit that most kids already have," Eikenberry said.
Students will have individualized graduation tracks. Some may start businesses of their own right out of high school; others may go to college, he said.
"We're trying to introduce a new narrative of 'what does it mean to be prepared for life, both now and after school,'" Eikenberry said.
Greenberg is familiar with the new narrative. He started a student-led democratic high school in Maine, led the Lehman Alternative Community School in Ithaca, N.Y., and served as principal of Greenville Technical Charter High School last school year.
He wants students to feel empowered to chart their own educational path.
Measuring success
Creating a trailblazing entrepreneurial attitude among high school students creates very different goals from conventional assessments.
NEXT High School will be graded on the number of patents applied for, the number of businesses started, the number of internship hours, the number of hours spent within the Greenville Area Development Corp. and how much money students have saved in education savings accounts by the time they graduate, Eikenberry said.
Eikenberry said he wants NEXT High School to become iconic in Greenville, to make it the most innovative school in the Southeast that cities like Atlanta, Charlotte and Raleigh look to as a model.
But even he isn't sure what NEXT High School will end up looking like.
The project has the corporate backing to move ahead and corporate partners who will hold them accountable, but as a revolutionary approach to education, there will be a learning curve for the school and the community, Eikenberry said.
"In a school where failure is OK, isn't it alright for the school itself to iterate and change and develop?" Eikenberry said.
Updated Oct. 6 with clarifications from NEXT High School about the school's facilities and leadership.