Loma Park Elementary – San Antonio, TX

Today’s School Spotlight takes us to Loma Park Elementary in San Antonio, Texas, where in true Texas form, everything is done BIG. Yesterday’s blog by State of the Re:Union’s contributor Mark McGrath mentioned the Bright Spot Program, which is part of  Campaign for Grade Level Reading, a collaborative effort that the National Civic League is involved with. (To read yesterday’s post, click here.)

Source: Campaign for Grade Level Reading

This program reaches across the country and customizes its tactics to reflect the issues of each region. According to the Website, the one thing that the program shares across the board is its goal:

• Closing the gap in reading achievements that separates many low-income students from their peers
• Raising the bar for reading proficiency so all students are assessed by world-class standards
• Ensure all children have equitable opportunity to meet those higher standards

The Bright Spot Program recognizes Loma Park Elementary is a high opportunity school. According to a release from the program, “The students at Loma Park Elementary get excellent scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, but they learn much more at school than the answers to test questions. ‘I want my students academically prepared for their careers in school and beyond,’ says Principal Alicia Garcia. She and Loma Park teachers want all students to “be self-directed learners, to read critically for meaning, and simply to love reading literature.”

Source: Loma Park Elementary School

Loma Park staff and district personal worked together in designing an innovative program that uses a balanced literacy approached to instill in the children a passion for reading.

In their approach to resolving educational issues plaguing their community, their reading initiative “Let’s Read!” is looking systemically at child development issues that can potentially impede a child’s academic success. According to the Grade Level Reading Initiative post, “Loma Park is leading the district in preemptive, early developmental screening of all incoming students — looking at social and emotional issues, health issues such as diabetes and asthma, fine and gross motor coordination, speech problems, and any other difficulties that might interfere with reading and overall academic success. Teachers trained in evaluation and data interpretation by a health professional administer the screening in January, after they’ve developed a relationship with each child. Parents trained as advocates, called ‘Promotoras,’ play a crucial role by reaching out to individual families in the community and communicating results.”

‘Through this approach,’ says Garcia, ‘we are able to identify and address developmental issues as early as possible to ensure that each child has the best possible chance to reach his or her academic potential.’”

Another way that Loma Park is achieving success is through marrying fun and education with its after-school program. The “Club House” embeds literacy instruction in the settings of students’ play. As an example, in the Cooking Club, students read and interpret recipes and convert measurements. They also have “Saturday Adventures,” which allows after-school students to take what they’ve learned throughout the week in the Club House and apply it in various locations in the community.

In addition to these program elements, Loma Park uses the district-wide “Universal Review System,” making it possible to evaluate a child’s progress every nine weeks. “The System also matches each child with appropriate interventions and tracks progress for each intervention. With support through the Casey Foundation’s Making Connections program, Foundations, Inc. provides additional assistance in staff development and needs assessments,” according to the Bright Spot release.

The Alamo in San Antonio, TX

Loma Park Elementary School is doing all that it can to “develop community-based strategies that reinforce reading progress.” The school is working with many community organizations (civic, nonprofit, churches, universities, et al.) to make certain that “every child has access to individualized support.”

San Antonio is a place that is steeped in the Texas tradition of never giving up – the epic battle of the Alamo bears testament to that. Embracing this same spirit are the faculty, teachers, students and families of the community that Loma Park Elementary School serves. This approach introduces students to environments rich with reading materials. As part of its base instruction, they use the premise that students’ reading abilities will advance with access to the proper materials and support. With a teacher’s guidance, reading increases in difficulty with each accomplished level of reading skill improvement.

SOTRU’s School Spotlight continues in its quest to find schools such as this who demonstrate and achieve community in education success. If you know of a school or community with the same modus operandi, we would love for you to tell us about it.

Lately I’ve been browsing the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading website, which has a feature called “Bright Spots,” a collection of local success stories about reading programs.

One of those bright spots is Morningside Elementary School in Brownsville, Texas. About 99 percent of the kids are Hispanic. About 99 percent are on the free or reduced-price lunch program (FARM). About 80 percent are Spanish speakers.

Students reading in Morningside Elementary's library

This is a demographic that typically haunts the less- than-excellent categories of statewide standardized performance tests. Not at Morningside. Quoting from the website:

“During exam time at Morningside Elementary, big posters appear with a simple message: 90%. ‘I expect everyone to get at least 90 percent on the test,’ says Principal Dolores Cisneros Emerson. Ambitious? Yes, but consider that 100 percent of Morningside third graders — virtually all from low-income families —were reading at grade level on the state assessment test last year, and 55 percent were commended for having no more than three questions wrong. Emerson expects excellence from Morningside students, no matter where they come from. Benchmarking, regrouping, individualized instruction, tutorials, and relentless optimism get results.”

“It’s true,” said Morningside Principal Delores Cisneros Emerson, when I asked her about the bright spot description. “We’re awesome. Let me tell you. We’re the best.”

The school uses the aforementioned benchmarking to determine individual strengths and weaknesses. Kids who are performing poorly are placed in smaller sized classes and meet with an “interventionist” to work on skills.

The school has regular tutorials, three days a week in the fall and spring, to help kids who are not doing well and kids who could be doing better with a little push. Ten times a year the school has tutorials on Saturdays to make sure the kids get enough time with the teachers.

“There are a lot of facets that contribute to students’ success on the campus,” said the principal. “One of them is the teachers really caring about the kids and doing everything possible to make sure they get what they need and treating each child as an individual. Second, the interventions with the kids who aren’t doing well and benchmarking the kids really often and seeing what skill they are lacking and working on that skill for those kids.”

Morningside Elementary student reading in the school's library in Brownville, TX

The third key to success, says the principal, is parents. “I have a very strong parental base,” she says. “They may not be here every day sewing or cutting or making copies, but they support the school. They send their kids to school. Last year I had an ADA (average daily attendance) of 97 percent. They are trying to survive themselves, but the best way they can support me is to make sure they get their kids to school.”

Research tends to bear this out. One of the critical barriers to performance by low income kids is poor attendance.  Attendance is one of the three critical areas the campaign is asking schools and communities to focus on as a way of upping reading performance. The others are school readiness and the summer reading gap, the fact that low income kids lose ground during the summer months if they are not reading regularly.

Another key to success: “I know where the kids come from,” she said. “I know what their future is if they don’t become educated.”

She grew up in Brownsville, a city of about 175,000, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico and attended local public schools, a local university and a local graduate school. She learned her management skills from another dedicated educator, Ernestina Treviño, who recently retired as principal of A.S. Putegnat Elementary, another school with mostly Hipsanic low income kids that has shown excellent results in the performance tests.

The National Civic League's All-American City Awards

“She would always try to think what she could do more for those kids to succeed,” she said. When she got her own school, she was determined to duplicate her mentor’s performance. When she came to the school, it had not made the AYP (average yearly progress) benchmark under the “No School Left Behind” law. Her first year, it made the AYP but just missed being classified as exemplary. “The second year, we became exemplary and we have been exemplary ever since.”

We used to run an awards program for outstanding educators, and I interviewed a number of the honorees. How to describe? “Dedicated,” doesn’t quite get it, “energetic,” yes, “confident,” that would be an understatement. I’m talking teachers and principals who work in low income, high crime parts of our cities and seem to have no problem mobilizing kids, parents, teachers, community and business people—any and everybody—to buck the expectations and statistics. It’s like what the NASA guy says in the movie, Apollo 13. For these people, failure really isn’t an option.

Does this remind you of a school you know? Tell us about it. We love to learn about communities and schools coming together to help their children achieve success.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

I recently found myself embroiled in a “not-in-my-backyard” dispute, pitting my neighborhood against a well-connected group of investors who hoped to operate a late night dance club 55 feet from my bedroom window.

I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, that we neighbors felt pretty lucky to have an active neighborhood organization to argue our case. Without them, we would have felt completely bulldozed by the coterie of professionals—a lawyer, a sound engineer, a paid petition organizer and assorted local power brokers—who showed up at the licensing hearing.

A Ribbon Cutting for a Neighborhood Improvement Project in El Paso

The point is: wouldn’t it be great if every neighborhood in the U.S. had an association or an organization to look after its interests and serve as a sounding board for community concerns? Often it is the more affluent areas of cities that are best organized and the less affluent ones that tend to get ignored.

Some cities have gone out of their way to help neighborhoods that aren’t well organized. In El Paso, Texas, a 2010 All-America City, if a neighborhood doesn’t have an association, the city’s Neighborhood Services Department will help them start one.

The program dates back to 2003, when the El Paso City Council passed the city’s first Neighborhood Recognition ordinance to address two concerns, local apathy and the imbalance of power between organized neighborhoods and unorganized neighborhoods.

• A new and improved Neighborhood Recognition ordinance was adopted to further define neighborhood boundaries. The city identified those neighborhoods that weren’t represented and started looking for ways to bring them to the table.
• An annual Neighborhood Leadership Academy was convened to provide citizens with the direction and savvy they need to navigate city processes and to become neighborhood resources and ambassadors. The academy seeks out nontraditional leaders to ensure that all members of the community are represented.
• El Paso’s Neighborhood Improvement Program gives residents opportunities to submit their own neighborhood-driven small-scale capital projects. During the first two rounds of the program, $850,000 has been expended and 21 projects completed.

A Meeting of Neighborhood Groups in El Paso

Since the program began, the number of neighborhood associations has nearly doubled and citizens feel they have more say in the decision-making process. A coalition of the city’s 67 associations meets monthly to discuss citywide issues and how the effect the various neighborhoods.

“I think we’re getting there,” says coalition president Mark Benitez, when asked how the neighborhood empowerment program was working. “We’ve empowered quite a few people to address different issues. I think it has had a big effect on the areas that have been underserved over the years.”

“This benefits the city too,” added Benitez, who heads the Cielo Vista Neighborhood Association. “It gives the city government a chance to voice their issues and goals to the neighborhoods.”

I know of other cities that have embraced the value of neighborhood power—Rochester, New York’s Neighbors Building Neighborhoods program, Portland, Oregon’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement and Fort Wayne, Indiana’s Community Oriented Government—to name a few. (If you are interested, read more about them in this report on local government and civic engagement I wrote a couple of years ago).

I have no idea how my particular neighborhood beef will turn out. I’m just glad the local neighborhood organization had my back. Otherwise, I would have been pretty frustrated by the process. To me, these two-way communication systems that El Paso and other communities have pioneered are the essence of democracy. I’m always interested in learning about any other examples of neighborhood-based local government programs. If you know of any good ones, e-mail me at aac@ncl.org.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.