knows that. The success of the charter schools and the support they received did not escape the attention of the more enterprising public school teachers and administrators. Blatter, the energetic principal of PS 109, an elementary school in the South Bronx, went to many of the same benefactors of the charter schools and said, in effect, “Hey, I need help, too.”
She outlined plans to convert a barren second-floor bookfree space back into the library it once had been and added a new twist: make it a community study center for residents of the surrounding impoverished Hispanic neighborhood and invite parents to use it in the early evening as a study hall with their children.
Blatter was so successful that she raised enough money for a full complement of computers and e-readers. On the day she dedicated the facility, the students poured into the room and powered up the computers and e-books, accessing their favorites beneath a banner that read “A room without books is like a life without a soul,” the observation of Marcus Tullius Cicero.
A few weeks after the dedication, Blatter told me, “The library has been an amazing success. Children are visiting every day and checking out so many books we need to significantly increase our inventory. We have the library open two nights a week until six o’clock for parents taking English as a second language—ESL—classes.”
Amanda Blatter and her faculty worked hard before the library was rebuilt to make PS 109 one of the best-performing schools in the South Bronx. They now feel they have an opportunity to do the same for the neighborhood and the parents.
Blatter is a reminder that with all the attention focused on charter schools and the role of outside interests, dedicated and gifted public school teachers and administrators continue to show up every day. They are more than instructors and managers, there only to collect a paycheck and benefits. They’re surrogate parents, community advocates, and a vital link between hope and despair for their charges.
At Jack Britt High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, students have a similarly creative principal, Denise Garison. She attacked student and community indifference with a bold, unconventional approach. She was frustrated by the constant gap between the test scores of white students and those of her African American and Hispanic students. Whites consistently scored almost 13 percentage points higher. She refused to accept the whispered stereotype that the minority students just weren’t as bright.
So she dug into the records of the underperforming students and found that many of them were chronically absent and came from families where school failure was endemic—passed along from generation to generation.
Garison went to her teachers and challenged them to change the game at Jack Britt High, just as a new coach would challenge his staff and the community to improve the record of a losing football team.
Teachers responded by spending more individual time with the at-risk students identified in the survey; they even handed out their own email addresses so students could be in touch when they encountered homework problems. In a radical departure from convention, Garison persuaded the school district to pay twenty dollars an hour to teachers who volunteered to be at the school on Saturdays from 8 A.M . to 4 P.M . so students could get extra tutoring on standardized tests. When that money ran out, many of the teachers voluntarily showed up on Saturdays without compensation. A community organization provided the Saturday school lunch.
Jack Britt student Teshiya McClean was failing everything as a freshman, but when her teachers began to take a special interest in her, she responded. By her senior year she was on the school honor roll. “I am very proud,” she says. “They taught me I can do anything I put my mind to.”
Denise Garison at Jack Britt High School (Photo Credit 3.3)
This aggressive approach at
She outlined plans to convert a barren second-floor bookfree space back into the library it once had been and added a new twist: make it a community study center for residents of the surrounding impoverished Hispanic neighborhood and invite parents to use it in the early evening as a study hall with their children.
Blatter was so successful that she raised enough money for a full complement of computers and e-readers. On the day she dedicated the facility, the students poured into the room and powered up the computers and e-books, accessing their favorites beneath a banner that read “A room without books is like a life without a soul,” the observation of Marcus Tullius Cicero.
A few weeks after the dedication, Blatter told me, “The library has been an amazing success. Children are visiting every day and checking out so many books we need to significantly increase our inventory. We have the library open two nights a week until six o’clock for parents taking English as a second language—ESL—classes.”
Amanda Blatter and her faculty worked hard before the library was rebuilt to make PS 109 one of the best-performing schools in the South Bronx. They now feel they have an opportunity to do the same for the neighborhood and the parents.
Blatter is a reminder that with all the attention focused on charter schools and the role of outside interests, dedicated and gifted public school teachers and administrators continue to show up every day. They are more than instructors and managers, there only to collect a paycheck and benefits. They’re surrogate parents, community advocates, and a vital link between hope and despair for their charges.
At Jack Britt High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, students have a similarly creative principal, Denise Garison. She attacked student and community indifference with a bold, unconventional approach. She was frustrated by the constant gap between the test scores of white students and those of her African American and Hispanic students. Whites consistently scored almost 13 percentage points higher. She refused to accept the whispered stereotype that the minority students just weren’t as bright.
So she dug into the records of the underperforming students and found that many of them were chronically absent and came from families where school failure was endemic—passed along from generation to generation.
Garison went to her teachers and challenged them to change the game at Jack Britt High, just as a new coach would challenge his staff and the community to improve the record of a losing football team.
Teachers responded by spending more individual time with the at-risk students identified in the survey; they even handed out their own email addresses so students could be in touch when they encountered homework problems. In a radical departure from convention, Garison persuaded the school district to pay twenty dollars an hour to teachers who volunteered to be at the school on Saturdays from 8 A.M . to 4 P.M . so students could get extra tutoring on standardized tests. When that money ran out, many of the teachers voluntarily showed up on Saturdays without compensation. A community organization provided the Saturday school lunch.
Jack Britt student Teshiya McClean was failing everything as a freshman, but when her teachers began to take a special interest in her, she responded. By her senior year she was on the school honor roll. “I am very proud,” she says. “They taught me I can do anything I put my mind to.”
Denise Garison at Jack Britt High School (Photo Credit 3.3)
This aggressive approach at
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