David Boucher, right, teaches geography at the Phoenix Academy, which this school year replaced the shuttered Edwin Brown Alternative High School in Redmond. Phoenix science teacher Amy Mitchell, below, had some of the same students when they were Redmond High freshmen.

REDMOND —

Todd Slaven was sure things wouldn’t go well when he started school at Redmond’s new Phoenix Academy last week. Todd, 17, is a senior at the school on Redmond High School’s Hartman Campus. At the start of this school year, Phoenix replaced Edwin Brown Alternative High School, which the district closed.

When students heard about the decision to close Brown, they protested to district officials. The move was made in part because of budget problems and in part because the district wanted the alternative program more closely linked with Redmond High.

But students wanted no part of being closer to the large high school, Todd said. “It was a real skeptical mood,” he said of the atmosphere at Brown. “We weren’t sure how it was going to happen.”

But things have turned out far better than Todd feared, he said. The class sizes have stayed around 15 students, and some teachers from Brown are involved in the program, Todd said.

The academy has six full-time teachers. Three teachers from Brown came to Phoenix, and some of the others were already familiar to the students.

Amy Mitchell teaches science at Phoenix and had many of the same students as freshmen at Redmond High before they transferred to Brown. That’s helped the adjustment as students and teachers get used to the new surroundings.

“I think (the transition) was good,” Mitchell said. “It seems a lot smoother than I feared it would be.”

When the closure was originally announced, the district planned to house the Phoenix Academy in a separate wing at Hartman. But Redmond High Principal Jon Bullock said that plan would only have kept the academy students isolated, as they were last year. Students from Phoenix now mix with students from other parts of the school, including the International School of the Cascades. ISC classrooms sit next to Phoenix classes.

“Now, there’s an entire social network that’s beneficial to all the students,” Bullock said.

But that idea of an expanded social network was met with doubt last year from students at Hartman and Brown. Seventeen-year-old Raven Farris, a Phoenix senior, said people at Brown also worried about how they would be received.

But Raven said that despite her worries, students have treated each other well in the hallways between classes and in the cafeteria during lunch.

“(Friends) were worried,” said Raven, who also takes classes at Redmond High. “There haven’t been fights or anything.”

There haven’t been any discipline problems with the new students, Bullock said.

Adjustment period

More than 100 students are enrolled in Phoenix, about the same as last year at Brown. Not all of the students go to school full time at Phoenix, though. Raven, for example, takes two classes at Phoenix, one at Redmond High and a fourth at Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council.

Phoenix students are on a slightly different schedule than the rest of the Hartman campus. The typical schedule on the campus is five class periods, each usually lasting 76 minutes. But the Phoenix students have their classes cut in half, so that an academy science class is taught over two shorter periods.

A Phoenix student might have science for 38 minutes, then language arts for the second half of the period. The student would attend the other half of the classes later in the day, Bullock said.

That was designed to help students who struggle to stay focused through longer classes, Bullock said. The schedule, he added, represented the school’s effort to adapt to different learning styles.

“We have another opportunity where kids can find an environment that works best for them,” Bullock said.

Shannon Danley, 16, was walking the hall Tuesday trying to find her next class. Shannon spent last year at Brown and had wanted it to remain open. With her schedule in hand, she said the split schedule was confusing and that she was still apprehensive about being at Phoenix instead of Brown.

But Phoenix is her new school, and she would adjust, she said. “They made it so it would work,” Shannon said of the schedule. “I have pretty much no choice but to try.”

Genna Miller, 16, a junior at the International School of the Cascades, said some people worried about conflict once the new students moved to the school.

But she said the different academies at the campus have so far gotten on with the business of school. “Last year, people were assuming the worst,” Genna said. “This year, we’re just in school.”