Melissa Bailey Photo
Hooker’s Robles-Rivas & Hershonik.
Quick learners at the Hooker School will get newfound independence, and a new team of teachers aims to boost Dixwell kids’ test scores by 10 percent, according to new plans due to take effect this fall.
Principals of the Worthington Hooker, Columbus Family Academy and Wexler/Grant Community schools shared those plans, and more, at a Board of Education meeting Monday night.
The K‑8 schools are among 11 that will face “transformations” this fall as part of the city’s school reform drive. According to the plan, all city schools are being graded into three tiers and managed accordingly—click here to read about three other “transformations” under way.
The latest plans reflect one of the goals of school reform: to boost performance at not just the most struggling schools, but at all levels.
Principal Sheryl Hershonik (pictured above at right, with Assistant Principal Evelyn Robles-Rivas) is in her first year as head of the Worthington Hooker School in East Rock, the city’s highest-performing school, stocked with many international students from the Yale community.
Hershonik said many people don’t know that Hooker is the city’s most diverse school. While many students live in comfortable East Rock homes, 52 percent of students qualify for free and reduced price lunch, a benchmark of poverty. There’s a wide range of academic and intellectual levels, she said. The school also has many “English-Language learners.”
For students who come to school behind their peers, Hooker plans to “ensure early identification” of literacy interventions. But there’s also a collection of students who don’t need extra help, Hershonik said — “quick learners” who need an extra challenge in the classroom instead.
Hershonik said the school plans to create a new program to “address the needs of identified advanced students.” The program will give kids the chance to do independent research, she said.
Despite the school’s test top-notch test scores, some Hooker graduates still “flounder” when they get to high school because it turned out that Hooker was “helping them too much,” Hershonik said. The new program, dubbed ALPs, aims to help students stand on their own feet before they move on to high school.
Hooker also plans to give kids more chances to do community service.
“It’s important for students, at any age, to know they’re not the center of the universe,” Hershonik noted. She said parents are helping to create more service learning opportunities, and the school plans to launch a major recycling push for all grade levels. The school also plans to integrate arts education into the curriculum, and introduce “town meetings” to showcase student work.
Hooker School stands in Tier I, at the top of the citywide school rankings. According to the city’s new “portfolio management” approach, Tier I schools are given more autonomy; Tier II schools are given mid-level autonomy; and low-performing Tier III schools may face dramatic work rule changes or even be taken over by a charter group. All the schools were graded in January, but the changes are being phased in with batches of seven to 11 schools per year.
Wexler/Grant, where 93 percent of kids are on free and reduced priced lunch, stands at the opposite end of the spectrum. Fewer than half of the students there scored “proficient” in reading on last year’s standardized tests. When Principal Sabrina Breland took over the school, test scores had been sliding for five years. Morale was low, and surveys showed the school ranked the lowest in the district in terms of safety.
The school is a “Tier III Turnaround,” which means Breland has the authority to hand-pick her staff for next year. She fired half of the teaching staff, and she’s already at work on setting a new tone for the culture of the school. She said 40 applicants attended a career fair at the school last week. She made offers to two teachers, hired another from Teach For America and has eight open spots, she said.
Breland, a former basketball coach and champion point guard, said she has assembled a “Dream Team” of staff to lead the transformation. The principal told the board that she played on the Wilbur Cross High School team that won the state championship in 1983. She brought home the state championship again in 1998 when she coached the James Hillhouse High School girls basketball team.
She pledged to bring home another state championship — this time an academic one. “We are going to make Wexler/Grant one of the elite schools in the state,” she told the board. “We’re going to be on top.”
The “Dream Team” she introduced comprised eight women, including Assistant Principal Nicole Sanders (at left in photo). Sanders said the school plans to focus on instructional rigor, assessed through classroom visits and student portfolios. Teachers will need to be prepared to explain the work in a given student’s portfolio, and how their lesson is helping that kid. She pledged a 10 percent annual increase in student test scores for grades K to 3.
Looking over the numbers, board member Alex Johnston suggested that the goals aren’t set high enough. The district has a goal of closing the achievement gap with the state in five years, which would mean dramatic gains at struggling schools like Wexler/Grant.
Breland conceded there’s a “long road ahead.” She said her new team is up for the challenge. District staff agreed to offer more hard numbers next time to see whether each school is on track to make the progress the district has pledged to make.
At Columbus Family Academy, a bilingual school in Fair Haven, Principal Abie Benitez plans a new initiative to help students set their eyes on college. Each grade level will “adopt” a local college, research what is offered there, and visit the campus. Benitez said she wants students to learn vocabulary about college degrees, and to picture themselves earning them.
Also on tap: New morning meetings, where kids will develop relationships with an adult they can trust; more guided lesson planning for teachers; and a new curricular unity where students learn about a topic — such as astronomy — in math, science, and English class all at the same time.