What If Wanting to Learn Isn’t Enough?

Every student who walks through the doors at Abraxas High School wants to learn.

That’s the starting point, the truth Abraxas builds from. The harder question is what happens when the system doesn’t meet their needs.

Abraxas High School is a public continuation school in southern San Diego County. Students arrive behind on credits, and until recently, the school meant to serve them looked almost exactly like the schools that hadn’t.

Principal Alain Henry and his team looked at this challenge and asked:

If the traditional model hadn’t already worked for these students, what was the case for running a traditional school?

A School That Decided to Actually Be Different

In January 2023, Abraxas fully transitioned to a competency-based education model. Not a tweak. A complete rebuild.

California state content standards didn’t disappear. Those standards were translated into competencies. Those competencies were then divided into credits. Credits add up to completed courses. What has changed is how a student demonstrates mastery and through what subject matter is no longer fixed.

The content is a vehicle. Students get to help choose where it goes.

Let Each Student’s Interests Do the Heavy Lifting

Many Abraxas students arrive saying they haven’t read a book since elementary school. Assigning The Great Gatsby and waiting for them to love it isn’t a strategy.

So instead, the school librarian sits down with each student to find a book they might actually want to read. From there, an English teacher helps shape the project, define the end product, and map out which competencies the work will fulfill.

The result? Teachers read essays on a dozen different books rather than twelve takes on the same green light at the end of the pier.

The same principle extends across subjects. A student fascinated by West African history might write an evidence-based essay on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that simultaneously satisfies a world history competency and an English argumentative writing standard. Add in an exploration of masks, textiles, or bronze casts tied to royal authority, and art history credits are in play, too.

Students catching up can’t afford to learn one thing at a time. Cross-curricular projects make every moment count across multiple subjects simultaneously.

Abraxas is building a streamlined menu of modules that map these cross-curricular possibilities. In the meantime, modules from past students are stored in a content warehouse within Headrush, available for reuse, remixing, or as a starting point for students who need help generating ideas.

Skills That Last Longer Than the Content

When was the last time you actually wrote a theme analysis?

Alain thinks about this a lot. Content fades. The skills that carry students through life, showing up, managing time, following through, and believing in themselves, are what Abraxas is really building.

So alongside academic competencies, teachers and advisors track student growth across six “Abraxas Skills”:

• Future readiness
• Effective communication
• Personal responsibility
• Organization
• Time management
• Student self-esteem

These aren’t soft extras. They’re central to the model.

“If you can do those six skills, you’re going to be effective in the world,” Alain said. “And as it turns out, when you score highly on those six skills, you’re showing up every day. You’re turning in your work. Your work is high quality. It all dovetails together.”

Headrush makes that growth visible, tracking it right alongside academic competencies as part of each student’s real record.

Teachers Collaborate, Students Get the Benefit

Traditional schooling isolates teachers as much as it does students. English teachers grade English work. History teachers grade history work.

At Abraxas, the competency model opens the door to genuine teacher collaboration. When a student’s project spans disciplines, multiple teachers can engage with it, co-create modules, review shared work, and align their feedback with what the student is actually building.

Headrush supports this directly. Teachers can build and share modules across subject areas, see each other’s work, and create learning experiences together that would be impossible to coordinate in a traditional LMS.

It turns out that the same flexibility that gives students more ownership also gives teachers more room to do their best work.

A New Learning System Needs a New Learning Management System

A model this intentional needs infrastructure to match. That’s where most innovative schools run into a wall.

Abraxas quickly realized their district’s default LMS was built for a different kind of school: fixed courses, standardized assignments, no need to track fractional credits or cross-curricular competencies. Using it would have meant constant workarounds and a system that quietly pushed back against everything the school was trying to do.

They needed a platform that could:

• Map learning to competencies rather than courses
• Award fractional credits
• Support collaborative, student-driven project building
• Track social-emotional growth alongside academic progress
• Store a growing library of past projects for students to draw inspiration from

Headrush was built for exactly this kind of school.

Students can see their tasks clearly and share their work with teachers. Teachers can access that work, leave feedback, and track credits without having to hunt for workarounds. Past student projects live in a content warehouse where they can be reused, remixed, or offered as starting points for students who need help generating ideas.

A Partner, Not Just a Platform

Headrush didn’t hand Abraxas an owner’s manual and walk away. Their team worked alongside the school so the new model could actually function with technology that enabled rather than hindered.

As Alain put it: “If what you’re doing doesn’t fit within a traditionally designed system, and you need something more flexible and totally customizable, Headrush is the tool you want. Headrush is for schools that are doing something different.”

If your school is ready to be different, Headrush is ready to help.