In Lindsay Schulte's all-girls communication arts class on a recent morning, students divided themselves into groups of four. The girls sat around rectangular desks and used colored markers to draw and write character traits of well-known personalities and historical figures.

Down the hall, the all-boys communication arts class studied characterization, using John F. Kennedy and Michael Jordan as subjects. They grabbed at the questions that teacher Dennis Love tossed around like a basketball.

Normandy High School is the latest in a growing number of public schools to embrace single-gender classrooms. It's part of Superintendent Stanton Lawrence's effort to turn around the Normandy School District, where low test scores and other academic markers have the North St. Louis County district teetering on the edge of accreditation.

Lawrence hired Principal Curt Green two years ago to take charge of the high school, where one-third of the students were not graduating.

Green had used single-gender classrooms to help turn around failing schools in Baton Rouge, La., and Atlanta. This year, he turned the third floor of East Hall of Normandy High into the Ninth Grade Academy, where girls and boys are separated from each other and the rest of the school.

The intent, Green said, is to improve learning, reduce classroom distractions and ingrain academic achievement into school culture.

"Freshman year is crucial," Green said. "You build your foundation. Often times, students get behind that first year and drop out later if they can't catch up."

For decades, private and Catholic schools in St. Louis offered single-sex education. But more public schools are giving it a try.

At suburban schools, single-sex classes have become a popular option for some parents. The Parkway School District has single-sex classes at Carmen Trails Elementary School and at Ross Elementary School. In St. Charles, Francis Howell Central Elementary School is at the end of a three-year experiment with single-gender fifth-grade classrooms.

At urban schools, the approach is used to target lagging performance, particularly among boys, whose declining academic achievement has school officials wringing their hands.

Among them are the high school and middle schools in East St. Louis and the Imagine Academy of Academic Success — a kindergarten through eighth-grade charter school in north St. Louis.

St. Louis school officials are exploring implementing single-gender classes in some middle and elementary schools, Superintendent Kelvin Adams said.

Teachers at the Ninth Grade Academy in Normandy say that boys are more likely to squirm in their seats, use nonverbal communication, talk out of turn and prefer classwork that requires them to use their hands.

So Love keeps his lectures short. Every now and then, he lets the boys get up and move.

In an all-boys setting, students who typically sit silently in the back of class will compete to answer questions, Love said. "It's really hard to get them sometimes to raise their hand and wait their turn."

Girls tend to be more verbal, teachers say, and they prefer organization and working in groups.

"Some of the girls are willing to participate and get involved, where maybe they were more shy before," Schulte said. "Some of them that might have been more quiet in class don't feel that fear of coming up and doing things they may not have been as comfortable with in front of the boys."

'Very focused'

Ninth-graders said they were skeptical at first. Girls and boys both predicted more fights and less learning. But the opposite has happened, they say.

In coed classes, 'some kids would act out so they could impress the girls," said student Raymond Mesa. "Now they sit down and do the work."

"I like the way that I'm learning," Rontez Williams said. "I'm very focused on my work."

Single-sex education in public schools became illegal in 1972 with the passage of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. Then in 2001, U.S. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act that made single-sex education in public schools legal again.

In 2002, only about a dozen public schools across the country offered single-gender classrooms. Now there are at least 540, according to the National Association of Single Sex Public Education.

Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women have spoken out against separating boys and girls, saying such classrooms are illegal and discriminatory. Other critics say the approach promotes gender stereotypes and fails to prepare students for a world where both sexes work together.

But advocates say it removes many obstacles that keep girls from achieving in science and math and that it engages boys who otherwise would sit in the back of the class.

"We want a culture where boys want to be scholars and girls enjoy computer programming and physics," said Leonard Sax, executive director of the single-sex public education organization. "That doesn't happen automatically."

Sax spent Nov. 12 in St. Louis training teachers at Imagine Academy. Sax encouraged teachers to use strategies that wouldn't work in coed classrooms, he said, such as using fantasy sports to help teach math to boys.

"If you don't know how to take advantage of the opportunity, you might not accomplish much," Sax said.

At Normandy High, Green said school officials will evaluate test scores at the end of the year to determine whether the single-gender approach should be expanded.

Ninth-graders Samone Smith and Josephina Sharkey said their classmates would rather be in classes with boys. The two of them, however, said they better relate to lectures in girls-only classes.

"Guys play around too much," Josephina said.

"It's so much more calm," Samone added. "If they just do this every year for freshmen, I do think it would be a good idea."