St. Laurence High School, an all-boys Catholic institution in Burbank known for its status quo-challenging pedagogy, will enter rare territory as it becomes coed.

The school's plan to provide students a single-gender experience as freshmen and sophomores before introducing them to coed classrooms as juniors and seniors is unparalleled within the Archdiocese of Chicago, and possibly beyond.

“It's something you cannot find at other schools in the area. It's a unique opportunity for both St. Laurence and our families,” said school President Joseph Martinez, whose inspiration for the distinctive approach came from Donna Kiel, a member of the ad hoc committee formed to ease the school's transition.

Kiel, director of the Office of Innovative Professional Learning at DePaul University and the former principal at St. Joseph High School, oversaw a similar but short-lived experiment at the Westchester-based high school in the mid-2000s after its neighboring sister school closed.

“It kind of intrigued me and in a way inspired us,” Martinez said of the plan Kiel implemented at St Joseph. “We like doing things that are nontraditional and unique to a Catholic school setting.”

He believes the approach — which is intended to help students get comfortable and gain confidence in their early years and preparing them for the coeducational experience they'll likely receive in college and beyond — could be a separator for the school at a time when attracting new students is paramount to staying in business.

“When you look at it,” Martinez said, “it's all about the market, it's about remaining at the forefront, it's about maintaining a competitive advantage and providing something that's unique and different to the families.

“There are a lot of reasons families make the decision to send kids to Catholic school and right now this model should provide a little bit of comfort in knowing that it should meet any family's potential needs.”

Maria Hawk, regional director of secondary schools for the Archdiocese, said she was not aware of any high schools that had followed St. Laurence's proposed model.

Sacred Heart Schools in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood, which offers single-gender classrooms on a coed campus for first- through eighth-graders, is the only Catholic school in the area known to offer something similar, archdiocesan spokeswoman Anne Maselli said.

Heather Gossart, senior consultant and director of the executive mentoring and counseling program at the National Catholic Educational Association, said she didn't know of another Catholic high school in the country operating with St. Laurence's proposed model.

“Often when schools become coed, they don't have the luxury of doing it in this hybrid fashion,” she said. “It's because often they're doing it for survival. Many single-sex schools have really felt that their long-term sustainability is dependent upon offering a coed education. This model that you're talking about, interestingly, I don't know of another school that's doing it quite that way.”

While groundbreaking, St. Laurence's embrace of its unique model will be gradual.

Rather than immediately integrating its first batch of incoming junior and senior female students — all of whom will be transfers from its closing sister school and next-door neighbor Queen of Peace — the school will maintain single-gender classrooms for all male and female students for the next three years, or the entirety of any current St. Laurence or Queen of Peace students' high school career.

“Families (at both schools) chose their school due to the fact that it was a single-gender school. They expected a single-gender environment within the classroom,” Martinez said. “Our overall goal is to provide the single-gender classroom experience that they all expected.”

This fall's freshman class won't have any female students, but starting in 2018-19, St. Laurence will accept boys and girls who will enroll knowing that their junior and senior years will be spent in classrooms together.

The first coed junior classes will convene during the 2020-21 school year, followed in 2021-22 by the first time junior and senior classes will be mixed.

“It gives us nearly three years to properly train, educate and professionally develop our teachers to understand and better educate in a coeducational environment,” Martinez said of the school's graduated approach.

That's not to say, however, that girls and boys will never cross paths inside the school.

All students will be on the same bell schedule, so they'll inevitably encounter one another as they roam the halls. For logistical reasons, lunch is likely to be a mixed experience, as are after-school clubs and activities.

It's possible that some elective classes with lower enrollment might end up being coed.

“When we find out a French class has seven boys and four girls interested, it doesn't make sense to have two separate French classes,” Martinez said. “So, we might open that up as a coed option.”

The goal, however, is to maintain 100 percent classroom separation for the first three years, and for the underclassmen thereafter. The core classes would remain single-gender, and any coed offerings would be optional, Martinez said.

“Our focus is to ensure that the transition of these families that requested and expected single-gender will continue to receive that,” he said. “Anything that changes each year, based on numbers or demand from students and families, we'll continue to communicate with everybody.”

Martinez said he knows flexibility will be key as St. Laurence navigates the early stages of its coeducational experiment. If families aren't happy with the early results, or the demand for the school's unique approach fails to materialize, it will take input from stakeholders to adjust and adapt accordingly.

“I feel we've been great at keeping the level of transparency with our entire community and I'll continue to do that throughout this process,” Martinez said. “These next three years will be very important for communicating to everybody and providing updates — letting them know we may not have all the answers or the right answers, but we'll ensure the education they receive is the education they deserve.”

Because it's still so early in the process, many of the plan's finer details have yet to be worked out. For now, Martinez and the school's transition committee are focusing on meeting short-term goals.

That means having town hall meetings for families to explain the basic vision and answer questions; getting an idea how many Queen of Peace students plan to enroll next school year and making hiring decisions based on the expected enrollment increase; and making sure the school's facilities are reconfigured to accommodate both sexes.

Martinez expects to begin taking a closer look at longer-term goals, such as curriculum development and class offerings, toward the end of March after seeing how many new students have registered for next year.

The challenge of bringing two schools together, Kiel said, is making sure that members of both institutions feel heard and that their needs are being addressed.

“Making sure that when you're leading cultural change that you have things in place that honor tradition but also create a new identity” is essential, Kiel said.

“What we did at St. Joe's and what they're doing at St. Laurence is to listen a great deal, host town hall meetings.

“Girls, how do I grieve the fact that I don't have the same school colors? Boys, how do we hang onto our history? We're losing something we had before,” she said. “The exciting part was creating something new, and the part that was challenging was to be transparent — ongoing communication with everyone, to not make decisions in isolation.”

Kiel will be monitoring St. Laurence's progress over the coming years, eager to see if its unique model can outlive the one she instituted at St. Joseph more than a decade ago.

Her vision for a hybrid gender educational model was informed by her research into single-gender learning styles, the subject of her master's thesis.

“Much of the research I had uncovered looked at how girls are very left-brained,” Kiel said. “Boys, genetically, tend to develop right brain quicker.”

For that reason, girls tend to excel early in classes such as English and social studies, while boys are quicker to grasp math and science, she said.

“In classes where boys excel, girls back up, answer rarely and aren't as assertive,” Kiel said. “Boys are the same in classes where girls excel.

“We wanted to give each gender an opportunity to excel, especially to establish a foundation during freshman and sophomore year.”

While the early results at St. Joseph were promising, she said, economic factors intervened.

“The real intent was for single-gender education to continue and to grow (at St. Joseph), but there were circumstances,” Kiel said, citing the financial crisis, which hit Catholic schools hard. “People couldn't afford Catholic education, so we took a hit in enrollment. We had to start very quickly realizing what we were going to do with single-gender.”

Maintaining separate single-sex classes was expensive, and students had become increasingly comfortable in a coed environment. With interest in single-sex classes diminishing among students, they were ultimately phased out, she said.

Kiel is hopeful that St. Laurence will have a longer run with its pioneering approach.

“I think the advantage that Jim (Muting, the principal) and Joe (Martinez) will have is that they'll be able to learn from what happened to us and do some better financial planning,” she said. “So if this is their vision they can keep it going.”

Gossart, at NCEA, also will be following St. Laurence from afar. She believes that because some children thrive in a single-gender environment while others do best with coed models, a hybrid approach sounds like “a wonderful idea.”

“It's the best of both worlds, if it works the way it's supposed to,” she said. “It certainly is one now that we at NCEA are going to be following the progress.

“Many of our schools are thinking outside the box and they're asking, ‘What can we do to ensure our viability, our long-term sustainability?' And for some schools that are single-sex, that (hybrid model) very well may be something that other schools look to.”

Martinez is excited about that prospect and believes the school is in a position to succeed with its unorthodox model.

“We're ready to accept challenges and we're ready to take risks that could work, or might not,” he said. “I know that we're ready to do it. And I know that we have to continue to put the right plan in place each year, continue to review that strategy and plan, and then measure it to make sure that it is meeting a demand.

“And if at some point it's not and we have to adjust, we'll be ready to do it.”

zkoeske@tribpub.com

Twitter @ZakKoeske