Mallory Henson’s biggest fear when she started high school was getting lost in the big building, but now that she’s a sophomore she knows that the differences between high school and junior high school go beyond the size of the buildings and into the classrooms.

“You have to be responsible on yourself,” she said. “Work has to be turned in on time and you have to do it.”

Henson, 15, was eased into that reality during her freshman year in Central High School’s ninth-grade academy, which debuted last year.

She not only didn’t get lost, because all her classes are in the ninth-grade hall with other ninth grade students, but her teachers kept a special eye on her and her freshman classmates throughout the year, trying to head off any failures and allowing some make-up work during the first semester as the new high school students acclimated to the high school environment.

Separating the students into their own hall and community allows the students to focus on the changes in the classroom without being distracted by the “high school frenzy,” said Kathy Rogers, assistant superintendent of the county school system.

“It helps to organize the students and then the faculty into what we might call a learning community that focuses on connecting students to each other and to their teachers and then to academics,” Rogers said. “When a student enters high school, we want them focused in on being successful.”

A year after the school system started ninth-grade academies in Villa Rica, Temple and Central High School, the Carroll County school system is investing more than $13 million into new buildings to house the county’s ninth graders at the three schools.

Villa Rica and Temple freshmen are attending classes in the new buildings while Central’s is still under construction. E ventually, the district plans to build separate academies at every high school.

The goal of the school-within-a-school approach is to keep first-year high school students from falling behind and losing credits as they adjust to the more rigorous high school requirements. And preliminary results are showing improvements. Two years ago, 88 percent of the county students left ninth grade on track to graduate with their peers and last year 91 percent were on track, Rogers said.

The numbers at Central High School showed marked improvement although the school had its largest class of freshmen, 340 students, said LaKeicia Denson, administrator of the ninth-grade academy.

In 2006-2007, 15 percent of ninth-grade students were held back and after the ninth-grade academy’s inaugural year only 6 percent of students had to repeat the year, she said.

“We cut that in half of students that will repeat ninth grade,” Denson said. “Because there was so much individualized time spent on those students, we knew beforehand who those students were going to be.”

With teachers focused only on the freshmen students, they were able to get to know the students and to intervene, getting them into summer school or approaching students to find out what problems they were having and to work out a solution.

The approach saved many of the students from having to repeat the year. The program is also having a lasting effect on the school as ninth-grade academy teachers can offer an insight on the students to their current teachers, Denson said.

Another issue the ninth-grade academy is trying to address is students being sent to the office for discipline. The visits, which are given for incidents such as having a cell phone go off in class or disobeying a teacher’s instruction, can reach into the thousands over the year, Denson said. “That’s about a 25- to 30-minute process, which means the student is spending that much time out of instruction,” she said.

Ninth grade is the grade with the most office referrals because students often don’t realize which behaviors will no longer be tolerated. Isolating the students in their own classrooms allows the teachers to deal with the behaviors more selectively than they would be able to in mixed-age classrooms. It also allows the students to learn the rules of the high school together.

Separating the ninth-grade students is essential to the academies, Rogers said.

“The whole purpose is to assist them in becoming ninth graders and to kind of have this a transition year where they can become fully integrated into high school life,” she said. “The isolation becomes key to helping them transition.”

It allows the teachers and the students to create a relationship that fosters communication and contributes to more successful students, she said. It creates a better teaching and learning environment for the students, she said.

It allows the students another year to mature as they learn how to be responsible for their own work, Denson said. By the time they’re seniors they won’t need all the help. This program allows the students the extra time they need to become successful high school students with a safety net so they don’t fall behind, she said.

So this year’s freshmen may have lost a little of the freedom that their predecessors may have enjoyed, but they have gained the support that hopefully will allow more of them to cross that stage and collect their diplomas with their peers in four years.

Sophomore Henson may not have noticed the extra supervision last year, but she knows now that it’s gone.

“It helped me with my work and stuff and kind of kept you organized,” Henson said. “The teachers really helped.”

The program is a proven investment in the district’s children, Denson said.

“We’re not doing anything that we guessed about,” she said. “We’ve got figures and numbers that show that it works and if it’s working and we can make it better, then it’s our job as a community to do just that for our kids.”