Van Buskirk Elementary and C.E. Rose K-8 Among Top Schools Nationally to Help Students Get Caught Up
C.E. Rose K-8 and Van Buskirk Elementary are doing something different than the average school across the nation.
The sense of belonging is where C.E. Rose and Van Buskirk really shine. Both schools focus on the sense of belonging, with both principals encouraging their staff to get to know all the students, not just their class. And know them on a more personal level so they either are already aware of any personal situations or students feel more comfortable confiding in them, so students are in a better mindset to learn.
It’s a team approach.
“Everybody on staff really wraps around the child to get to know them beyond what their academic needs are,” Van Buskirk principal Victoria Barajas said.
Better understanding each student’s needs also makes it easier for teachers to shift their lessons when needed.
Jade and Natalia are fifth-grade classmates at C.E. Rose. They both struggle with math, but in different ways. Jade struggles with equations and needs to put the work into a word problem to better figure it out. Natalia struggles with word problems and had to learn how to pull the necessary information to create an equation.
Their teacher worked with both of them individually to provide the tools they need to solve the math problems in their own way.
And that’s something that’s going on at both schools. Interventionalist practices aren’t being left for free period or after school, or even being solely tackled by a specialist – it’s taking place in the classroom in live time as the lessons are occurring.
At C.E. Rose, principal Alma Cardona-Alday implemented “Win Time,” an embedded intervention block within the school day.
“So, the teachers, what they do is they look at the student data and then they get a chance to kind of identify students and their needs, and then provide support,” Carmona-Alday said. “And students actually switch from teacher to teacher, and they’re able to support each other’s students as well, because they’re all our students.”
At Van Buskirk, when a teacher recognizes that a student isn’t in the right mindset in class, they’ll pull the kid over for an individual talk to sort through any personal issues before getting back into the lesson plan. It helps the students be prepared to learn, rather than teaching through distractions.
A similar act happens in classrooms at C.E. Rose. And even when the issue is curriculum related, teachers at either school will work in either individualized or small group settings to make sure any student struggling to learn a certain topic continues to learn it before jumping on to the next topic.
“I like it because they pay attention to each student,” Eliza, a fourth-grader at Van Buskirk Elementary said. “And if they’re not doing good, they let the [rest of the] class do something [else] and they pay attention to you for a couple of minutes and then pay attention to the class.
It’s one of the reasons The New Teacher Project (TNTP) came to both schools to observe and conduct research for a study that was recently published in the first paper in their Paths of Opportunity series.
Using public data in the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), TNTP looked at data from over the last 10 years and found that of the 28,000 elementary and middle schools studied, where the average student was not yet on grade level, only five percent of schools helped students catch up by gaining more than 1.3 years of learning per academic year. TNTP only looked at data that captured grades 3-8.
Of the schools in the top 5 percent, seven schools were selected to be studied in depth, including Van Buskirk and C.E. Rose. The two Tucson Unified schools were the only schools from the West. The five remaining schools were from Nebraska, Texas, Tennessee, New York, and Washington, DC.
“I think this [recognition] is very huge,” TUSD Regional Superintendent Mark Alvarez said. “…For us, it’s huge in the fact that two of [the schools selected for the in-depth study] were from here, from TUSD.”
TNTP looked at different factors when selecting schools, including how they serve different communities, use different school models, operate under different state laws, and have different resources and curricula.
Based on the data, in three years, students are able to catch up a full grade. The goal is to get students caught up by the time they make it to high school.
Van Buskirk goes beyond that. Students at the southside elementary school have gained 1.7 years of learning each year.
Ultimately, according to the published paper, the researched showed the seven schools studied share a commitment to doing three core things well: They create a culture of belonging, deliver consistent grade-level instruction, and build a coherent instructional program.
“I felt like we were doing what a lot of schools were already doing, and what they told us what that we were not,” Barajas said. “We were doing some things very well, and they wanted to find out what it was that we were doing to make such an impact on kids and their growth.”
