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A throng of seventh graders huddled on the dirt path surrounding their school’s athletic field. They were about to run a timed mile, and they were buzzing with excitement.
“Are you ready?” a teacher shouted.
“We were born ready!” the students shouted back.
It was a Thursday morning at the Girls Athletic Leadership School, an all-girls charter middle school in Denver, where the students run the mile three times a year. Their enthusiasm to participate in a ritual that many tweens dread on a sunny 80-degree day exemplifies their enthusiasm for their school, known affectionately as GALS.
At a time when enrollment in Denver Public Schools has shrunk, enrollment at GALS is growing. GALS opened in 2010 and has about 250 students this year, up 35% from the 187 it had three years ago but lower than its pre-pandemic high of 325. GALS is open to both girls and genderqueer youth and is the only single-gender public school in the city.
Efforts to expand the model have failed. A GALS high school lasted 10 years before closing this past spring due to low enrollment. An all-boys spinoff, called The Boys School of Denver, was open for just three years before it closed in 2020 for the same reason.
The closures are part of a pattern. Declining enrollment has caused 15 Denver charter schools to shutter in recent years. Ten district-run schools have closed for low enrollment as well.
So why does GALS — which combines the camaraderie of summer camp with the academic principles of small class sizes, frequent movement breaks, and lessons in relationship-building — work so well for middle school girls?
“The success of GALS middle school is because the design was around rethinking how middle school works, and has worked forever, for specifically this group of people,” GALS Principal Leah Bock said. “In middle school, girls learn to be small, physically and emotionally. We want them to be loud. We want them to run in the hallway. We want them to say what they feel, in an honest space that is protected for them.”
The research on single-gender schools is mixed. Some studies show all-girls schools boost girls’ self-confidence and academic achievement. Other research finds that separating boys and girls reinforces gender stereotypes and makes students more anxious about coed environments. A 2014 metaanalysis by the American Psychological Association found that single-gender schools offer girls no advantages over coed schools.
But that research doesn’t seem to matter to GALS students and their families. Moms describe the school as magical. Girls say it’s a place where they’re seen and heard — and where they don’t have to fight for attention.
“I’d had a lot of trouble with boys in elementary school,” said Rory Chambers, an eighth grader who started at GALS in sixth grade. “I didn’t want to go through that in middle school — the boys being like, ‘You can’t do that because you’re a girl.’”
Back on the GALS field, the athletic director sounded an air horn. The girls — some wearing fairy wings and tutus over their tank tops and running shorts — took off, kicking up dust.
‘All the students have a voice’
Julie Thornton’s classroom doesn’t have desks or chairs. The math teacher got rid of them as a way to signal to students that in her class, there are no rigid, preconceived notions.
“I want them to play with numbers and not think that perfection is what we’re going for,” Thornton said.
Instead, the girls start on the carpeted floor before they’re up and standing at full-sized whiteboards stationed around the room. On one recent day, they worked in groups to solve increasingly complex division problems. Thornton told them to take turns with the dry erase marker — and when she noticed one girl being left out, she gave her groupmates a reminder.
“All the students have a voice,” Thornton said as she watched the students work. “Sometimes some girls take over, but not to the same extent.”
Not to the same extent as in coed schools, that is. Compared with a typical middle school classroom, Thornton’s seventh grade math class is quiet. When the students do speak, their voices are nearly drowned out by the sound of the air conditioning. Thornton doesn’t like it.
“More sass,” she tells them.
After the group work, Thornton handed out worksheets. When one girl asked if she could sit against the far wall to work on hers, Thornton playfully admonished her.
“You don’t have to ask!” she said. “Be rebellious.”
That same philosophy didn’t work as well at The Boys School. There’s a difference, school leaders said, between building the confidence of girls, whom society expects to be obedient and agreeable, and building the confidence of boys, who get different societal messages.
“With girls, you’re trying to get them to be bigger,” said Bock, who was at GALS when The Boys School opened in 2017. “And you’re trying to do the same thing with boys, but also undo a lot of things, and I don’t know if we nailed that in the same way.”
There were other hurdles for The Boys School. GALS has its own building, but The Boys School rented space in two different churches, which may have made it less attractive to families.
The GALS high school ran into a different set of challenges. GALS expanded into the high school grades because students said they didn’t want to leave. But not enough wanted to stay, either. When the high school closed at the end of last year, it had just 58 students.
At GALS middle school, Jennie-Brenton Burness said she went from a shy sixth grader to an eighth grader who sang in the a capella group and acted in plays. But when it came time for high school, she chose George Washington High, a traditional school with 1,300 students.
“I wanted to test what I learned and put it into action in a community where there would be people louder than me,” said Jennie-Brenton, now a 17-year-old senior. “And with boys.”
‘I move a lot when I learn’
Movement and social-emotional learning are two of the most important parts of the GALS model.
Every class has “brain breaks.” That can involve a game in which students swat a kickball at each others’ shins, or “the chair flip,” in which one girl sits in a chair, gripping the sides, while her classmates try to turn her 360 degrees and a teacher ensures she doesn’t fall.
Each school day starts with 45 minutes of movement, from running to yoga to dance.
“They don’t love all of those ways of movement, but the hope is they find one that really sits with them,” Bock said. “Who wouldn’t want to come and be sleepy in the morning and then have this burst of movement that gets your brain ready for the day?”
Students move while doing schoolwork too. On a recent afternoon, seventh grade literacy teacher Lindsay Drapkin had her students write down examples of metaphors and similes from the novel “The House on Mango Street” and then run across the classroom to show her.
“I move a lot when I learn,” eighth grader Aliyah Morales said. “I can’t sit still for 10 minutes.”
Aliyah also loves a class called GALS Series that school leaders say focuses on the things adolescent girls should know but no one teaches: How do I be a good friend? How can I stand up for myself without stepping on someone else? How do I decide what I care about?
To teach about how nature and nurture shape people’s identities, teacher Sydney Costa had her eighth graders start last week by analyzing fictional characters. A lot of students chose Meredith Grey, the flawed main character from the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” Their homework was to analyze how they’ve been nurtured by answering a series of questions with a family member.
“You feel unique for having that class,” Aliyah said. “It’s kind of like I’m learning so much more about myself than I would in another school.”
Parents love it too. Shellie Chambers is a former middle school teacher. On a tour of GALS when her daughter Rory was in fifth grade, Chambers remembers saying to the GALS staff that she just wanted Rory to survive middle school and “come out whole.”
“They said, ‘Absolutely, but we want more. We want these girls to thrive,’” Chambers said. “That was a shift. Middle school does not need to be these three years we get through.”
On the recent Thursday morning, Bock, the principal, ran the mile with each group of students, setting the pace and finishing first each time. The fastest girls were not far behind her, clocking in at six minutes and 35 seconds.
But the teachers didn’t praise the fast runners any more than the slower ones.
“You slayed!” Bock said to a girl who finished near the back of the pack but scored a personal best. “You beat your time by four minutes!”
The girl smiled big.
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.