It was last Thursday that 14-year-old Nathan Harth got zapped again.
It happened in broad daylight. There were witnesses. His parents were informed right away, but what could they do for their recidivist son? Get zapped and you gotta face the music.
Getting zapped meant that Nathan wound up that day sitting in the media center of Coon Rapids Middle School, textbook spread open, at 4:15 p.m., more than an hour after school let out. Sitting at his table with Nathan were several buddies, one of whom got zapped by a teacher, the other two of whom zapped themselves.
Getting zapped at Coon Rapids Middle means you didn't do your homework and you have to make it up after school. This is the big feature of a new program called ZAP, an acronym for "Zeroes Aren't Possible." Its purpose is to target homework scofflaws, hand them orange "Zapped" tickets, have them call their parents immediately, and send them to a supervised study hall in the media center after school to make sure they get their assignments done.
Coon Rapids principal Michelle Langenfeld said she's aware of schools doing various things to improve homework completion, but knows of nothing quite like Coon Rapids Middle's program. And ZAP has yielded a dramatic uptick in grades.
Last Thursday, Nathan and his pals had plenty of company because about 150 kids got zapped that day.
Langenfeld has counted 616 of the school's 1,500 students as having gotten zapped since the school year began. More important, she's been watching grades. Last fall, the number of F's handed out in the school dropped to 87 from 500 in fall 2006. The number of D's dropped from 800 to 254 over the same time span. Perhaps the biggest indicator of success came in math.
"We did not have a single student in eighth-grade math fail math in the first quarter," Langenfeld said. "That's unheard of."