MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Morgantown High School was recently recognized and honored as one of the 12 ‘Model Schools’ in the United States. They were presented with this accomplishment at the Model Schools Conference 2026 in Orlando, Florida.
This award honors forward-thinking schools that drive transformation, inspire change, and implement groundbreaking strategies to improve student outcomes.
“‘Model School’ is sort of a nationwide honor to schools that says you’re doing innovative things with student engagement, rigor, and teacher efficacy,” Paul Mihalko, Morgantown High School Principal, said. “Just showing how schools can be, and being given the opportunity to tell your story while you’re at model schools.”
Over the past five years, Morgantown High School has embedded learning intentions, success criteria, and research-based engagement strategies into all professional learning experiences. Professional Learning Communities (PLC) analyze student data, while simultaneously strengthening instructional practices, resulting in measurable gains in both teaching quality and student achievement.
“We wanted to be able to walk into a classroom and see that every student was engaged in their learning, and, not only that, but we wanted them to show evidence of what they were learning,” Kevin Colistra, Instructional Support Leader at Morgantown High School, said. “We wanted our teachers to have the skills and the tools in order to change their instruction and what was going on in the classroom, in order to best engage our students.”
Morgantown High School especially focused on teachers engaging students and allowing them to take ownership of their learning and visible thinking routines, which are brief, repeatable question sequences designed to make students’ thought processes explicit and deepen critical thinking skills.
“John Dewey said something along the lines of, ‘Learning is not what is important, but reflecting on learning is what is important,'” Colistra added. “We spend a lot of time on student reflection. What have you learned today? What do you still need to know more of?”
The adjustments Morgantown High School has made over the years have heavily reflected within their students’ test scores.
Morgantown High School’s SAT mean composite score has now risen to a 1016, a 23-point increase over the past four years. The score now exceeds the state average by 105 points and the global average by 51 points.
“That’s unheard of throughout the country, that a school that would give that test to every student in the eleventh grade could get a mean score of over 1000,” Mihalko stated.
Additionally, Advanced Placement (AP) performance has increased by 17 percentage points since 2021, with 87% of AP students earning scores of 3 or higher in 2025.
“We were always successful in AP testing,” Mihalko said. “We gave a lot of AP tests. We also got a lot of 3’s or better on the AP test. We were sitting at 74% or 75% five years ago. We put these things in place in our classroom, we’re at 84% or 85% of our kids passing their AP exams.”
In addition to the other improvements made, Morgantown High School also implemented an instructional collaborator team, which meet twice a week to find ways in which students and teachers can improve in the most efficient ways. Every core department within the school, including math, science, English, history, career and technical education programs, and more, has an instructional collaborator.
“There was a mindset shift that had to happen at Morgantown High, and I think it has to happen in education in general,” Mihalko stated. “As the adults in the building, we don’t need to be the most knowledgeable people in the building. We just need to be able to be the people who can help students gain the knowledge to be the most knowledgeable people in the building.”
Despite all of the success Morgantown High School has reached, they are still aiming to continue to improve in the years to come.
“When kids go off to whatever the next thing they do, and it’s not just about going to college,” Mihalko concluded. “It’s about going to trade schools. It’s about going into the military. It’s about what have we done to prepare them for whatever that next level is.”
Story by Sophia WassickÂ