Brooke Harville, administrative assistant at the Innovative Center for Personalized Learning, spends her days advocating for Shaker students who find their academic groove beyond the walls of the high school.
"Sometimes, it's not the subject matter that a student doesn't understand when they're in the traditional high school setting, it's that there's a disconnect in the learning piece," Ms. Harville, a District veteran of 17 years, explains. "Sometimes, they just need a different way to receive the information."
And Ms. Harville has seen first hand that when some students have the opportunity to experience a different environment, their capacity for learning grows. “A lot of our students are doing amazing things. It’s great when you see them taking an online class here and the light bulb goes on,” she says. Ms. Harville keeps track of how many courses each student has completed and says that with many of the online classes, students can complete a class in two to three weeks. She says students even compete with each other to see who can finish the most classes by the end of a term.
The experience of working at the Innovative Center for the past three years has made Ms. Harville a more compassionate person, she says.
“I’ve seen the difference that it makes when a student sees that someone cares about them and that they matter. We let these students know that they’re important, because sometimes, they’ve lost that,” she says. “And they’ve helped me remember what it was like to be a young adult. Sometimes, as adults, we expect so much of them. But I’ve had to take a step back and have some compassion because I was once a young person myself.”
When Ms. Harville isn’t at the Innovative Center, she enjoys traveling. This past year alone, she’s been to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Nashville and Kansas City, Mo. She also keeps in touch with her two Shaker Heights High School graduates: daughter Lauren Harville (‘10), a program manager at The Fishing School in Washington, DC; and son Richard Simpson (‘06), who works at Swagelok in Solon.
Ms. Harville says someday, she may transition to working at the post-secondary level, as she earned her bachelor’s in Psychology and Marketing/Business from Capital University in Columbus and her Master’s in Education from Cleveland State University.
For now, she’s happy to continue working to make a difference in the lives of students at the Innovative Center. “We have such a diverse population of students here and I just love what they bring to the table each day,” she says. “And here at the IC, they get a great finish to a new start.”