A $10 million prize from the national nonprofit XQ Super School Project is already overhauling Vista High, encouraging more cross-disciplinary, independent projects; enhanced access to technology; and close attention to social and emotional skills. The changes support a contention of high-school reformers nationally and some educators here: “The way we’re teaching students, it’s not working,” the Vista science teacher Allison Whitman said during a recent weekday before school ended for the summer.

District officials have been pushing similar changes in all of Vista’s schools since a series of student forums four years ago revealed an unexpected truth. After Matt Doyle, Vista’s acting superintendent, helped interview more than 2,000 middle- and high-school students about their school experiences and dumped all of his interview notes into a software program that identifies the most frequently mentioned words, one word rose to the surface: “irrelevant.”

“That was kind of a gut check for us,” Doyle said, and it prompted the district to issue a challenge to all its schools—to create classes more tailored to their students’ interests. Vista High School and Barela leapt at the opportunity.

Vista High School was struggling with chronic absenteeism, and, most vexing to Barela, 10 percent of students who entered as freshmen dropped out before senior year.

The idea officials came up with two years ago, called the “personalized-learning academy,” or PLA, eventually formed the basis for the school’s winning XQ-grant application, and will be the model for the curriculum that Vista rolls out this fall.

In September, Vista’s entire incoming freshman class of about 700 will be split into five “houses” of between 130 and 150 students and four teachers each, with the teachers trained to home in on the students’ strengths and preferences. The XQ prize money, paid out over the next five years in $2 million installments, will fund total conversion of the school by 2020.

For Barela, the barometer for success for the inaugural freshman class is straightforward: “If we don’t lose ’em,” the school is making progress.

Vista’s transformation comes in the midst of increasing national attention on the potential of personalized learning— and the new technologies enabling it—to solve a whole range of challenges facing schools, from student behavior, to job readiness, to academic achievement. The term encompasses a variety of techniques, often involving technology, meant to give students more control over what they learn and how fast they learn it. Advocates say it’s more effective than having an educator present one lesson, at the same pace, teaching a group of students with different interests and needs. But the approach is so new that, so far, little evidence exists to suggest it can deliver on its potential, and there’s little agreement about what it looks like in practice.