Angela Untiedt Jerabek ’90 was working as a guidance counselor in 1998, and growing steadily more frustrated watching over half of her high school’s freshman class fail courses year in and year out.
“I thought there was no way this should be happening,” she recalls. “I knew these students and I’d seen how capable they were. I knew my colleagues were amazing. There had to be a solution.”
That solution lay in the form of the BARR (Building Assets, Reducing Risks) Model – a system Jerabek developed that provides teachers with the opportunity to understand the whole student, not just the portion they are able to see in the classroom.
“Too often, we found our education system was operating in silos. Our goal was to disrupt those silos, increase communication and give educators an idea of what the barriers are so they can figure out solutions that will be effective,” said Jerabek, the 2020 CSB/SJU Social Entrepreneur of the Year award winner.
“John may be struggling in math, but his math teacher might not know he’s excelling in English, or that he’s really involved in his community,” she continued. “As the counselor, I knew these things about John, but I couldn’t be the bottleneck for information.”
BARR uses two foundational pillars – data and relationships. Relationships are of three types: staff-to-student, student-to-student and staff-to-staff. Data is collected in real-time and is both quantitative and qualitative.
The model was first implemented in 1999 at St. Louis Park, the Twin Cities suburban high school at which Jerabek was then working. The most highly researched model in the country, BARR has 14 statistically significant outcomes for students, ranging from student engagement to higher achievement test scores.
Of equal importance, teachers demonstrate six statistically significant outcomes, all proximal measures for teacher retention. This track record of success has allowed it to grow to the point it has now been implemented in 350 schools across 22 states.
“The goal has been to disrupt the assembly line we inherited in education,” said Jerabek, who is now the executive director of the BARR Center. “When we do that, students and staff both do so much better.”
“I realized early on that this was a model that should be able to work anywhere because we weren’t changing curriculum. We weren’t changing staff. We were just increasing the ability for educators to see the whole student. And it has worked. We’re now in schools from the South Side of Chicago to Appalachia. We’re in districts large and small. It’s a model that can be applied wherever you go.”
Jerabek’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. She was recently awarded the prestigious James Bryant Conant Award – one of three awards that the Education Commission of the States (ECS) presents each year to celebrate outstanding commitment to public education.
The award dates back to 1977. Past winners have included distinguished names like former U.S. Senator and Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, children’s television legend Fred Rogers and Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the creators of Sesame Street.
ECS is a nonprofit organization made up of leaders of education in each U.S. state and territory, as well as the District of Columbia. It includes the governor, the head of each state’s education agencies and other legislative and education officials.
Jerabek received the award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., on July 11. She is just the seventh woman to receive the honor.
“It’s incredibly humbling,” she said. “To be included among the likes of Fred Rogers, Thurgood Marshall and the others is an amazing feeling. These are such amazing individuals who have helped so many young people. It’s tremendously gratifying to see the work we’ve done receive this kind of acclaim.”
Jerabek, who resides in Maple Grove, was an education major at CSB. She said her time at the school helped provide the foundation for the work she is now doing.
“Saint Ben’s was instrumental when it came to instilling in me the idea of being a servant leader,” she said. “BARR’s success is really the success of the educators and students in our schools. The talent is there; we just need to provide a system where it can be realized. “