One especially promising partnership formed between two high schools more than 500 miles apart: Hillsdale High School and Bostonia Global.
Each arrives with a real edge. Hillsdale brings 25 years of small learning communities and advisory inside a 1,500-student comprehensive high school, deep teacher collaboration, Kid Talk structures that make sure every student is known, and a protected culture with a graduate profile and portfolios already in place. Bostonia brings a fully competency-based, future-of-work oriented system that runs K-12 and beyond, personalized pathways backed by dual enrollment, ASU Online, and authentic work-based learning, and a non-GPA transcript that universities already accept.
At the convening, the two teams built a shared learning agenda. Hillsdale wants to learn what Bostonia has operationalized: how to build the rubrics, competency maps, and student work protocols; how to structure individualized pathways and flexible time in 11th and 12th grade; and how to connect all of it to college admissions without a traditional GPA. Bostonia wants to learn what Hillsdale has sustained: how to run Kid Talk-style systems for student support and coordinated family communication, how to gather and use relationship data and qualitative indicators in advisory, and how to sustain a redesign for decades inside a large, heterogeneous, district-run high school.
This is exactly what the pilot was built to do. It exists to connect schools engaged in redesign so these partnerships can form, and so the lessons that come out of them, the real learning from the field, can help other schools make similar progress now and in the years ahead.
