DeQUEEN — De Queen Elementary School is on Treating Plant Road in southwest Arkansas’ timber and poultry-processing country — just a hop and a skip from the Oklahoma line.
It’s a school where 65 percent of the 572 children enrolled last school year were Hispanic. Eight in 10 were from low-income families. And on the surface, the community seems ambivalent, at best, to the school district, approving just 27.3 mills — the second-lowest property-tax rate in the state — to support the local public education system.
Given those facts, it’s easy to conjure up images of a struggling school with poor pupil achievement, disheartened teachers and fleeing families.
But that image for De Queen Elementary is wrong.
The school’s enrollment — nine classes for each of third, fourth and fifth grades this year — is growing yearly.
The teachers rave about the support they receive in terms of leadership, training, supplies and parent involvement.
The creamy-white walls of the brand-new building are a brilliant backdrop for colorful displays of student work.
Notably, student achievement at De Queen Elementary is at the top of the charts.
Better than 93 percent of the pupils at the school scored at proficient and advanced levels on the Arkansas math and literacy exams in the spring of 2012.
When De Queen Elementary’s spring 2012 test results are broken down by student subgroups — white, Hispanic, English-language learners, economically disadvantaged — there are virtually no differences. Better than 90 percent of each of those subpopulations scored at their grade level or better in 2012.
“We have closed the gap,” said Gayla Morphew, the school’s literacy facilitator.
“When we looked at test scores last year ... we looked at the Hispanic subgroup versus the Caucasians, and there was no disparity. That’s when we knew we had done the right thing. You are really unable to tell statistically which group you are talking about when you look at the numbers.”
For those kinds of results, De Queen Elementary is one of three recipients of this year’s Dispelling the Myth Award presented by The Education Trust, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
The organization annually identifies a handful of highperforming schools that have large percentages of poor students and/or students from racial and ethnic minority groups who are making gains and achieving well above state averages.
Norfork Elementary in Baxter County was a winner in a previous year.
Daria Hall, The Education Trust director of kindergarten through 12th-grade policy, said the national award aims “to inspire and inform.”
“We want to prove to people that it can be done,” Hall said. “Just because you are a school serving low-income kids and kids of color, that does not mean you are by necessity going to be a low-performing school.”
“Equally important, we want to provide information,” Hall continued. “What is it that these types of schools are doing to get the results they are getting?”
Hall called schools like De Queen Elementary “precious educational resources.”
“We need to tap their learning so that we can scale up those kinds of successful practices,” she said.
The Education Trust scours school data, and when its officials come across an improving, high-achieving campus with a well-rounded curriculum, they visit.
“You want to see the kind of instruction and the kind of school environment that aligns with the data,” Hall said of the visits. “We absolutely saw that in spades at De Queen.”
HOW IT WORKS
Terriann Phillips, principal of the now national-awardwinning school, attributes the De Queen student achievement gains to the hard work of the faculty.
“I’m very blessed with a staff that does not mind trying something,” said Phillips, principal since 2001.” If we ask them to, they are going to try it and give it their all.”
Superintendent Bruce Hill said the achievements are a testament to an excellent faculty that has embraced the school’s ethnic diversity.
Morphew said, “We don’t see color here. You can be striped. You can be polkadotted. We don’t care. There is accountability, and there is motivation for everybody to succeed. And we are going to do whatever it takes.”
“Whatever it takes” covers a lot of ground at De Queen Elementary. For example:
Even before the regular school day begins, two groups of early arriving pupils — about 120 — cycle through the computer labs to practice math and literacy skills. Tutoring is provided by teachers after school, too.
Two English as Second Language teachers, Melissa Jester and Jill Smith, and two bilingual aides, Cristal Sotelo and Marcela Chavez, work with non-English and limited-English speaking pupils so they get the same lessons as their more English-fluent peers.
Parent meetings are offered in Spanish and English, and at different times to accommodate shift workers at the industries.
Pupils answer math questions from teachers or retell reading stories from the day before while in lines moving between classrooms.
Teachers use lunchtime to read aloud a novel or teach character lessons.
The Razzle Dazzle competitive fifth-grade choir and the Renaissance Club in which fifth-graders volunteer for extra responsibilities and rewards are incentives to younger pupils.
Overarching those and other features of the school are academic units based on new national education standards — the Common Core State Standards — and the district’s long-standing Direct Instruction supplemental reading program.
Direct Instruction is a structured program in which an adult using a pre-written script guides no more than a dozen pupils who have similar abilities through a series of reading-related exercises. Those exercises include sounding out words, defining words, reading passages aloud and answering questions to ensure comprehension.
“It’s a supplemental program, but it’s a program that we couldn’t do without,” said Phillips.
The program costs the district about $900,000 a year, mostly paid for with federal Title I money. That cost covers 15 aides who lead the daily Direct Instruction classes for all pupils in grades kindergarten through three, and for the fourth- and fifth-graders who need to build their reading skills. The classes are up to an hour-and-15-minutes long a day — time that Phillips describes as sacred.
“We even fashion tornado and fire drills around those classes,” she said.
Patti Clay, the district’s Direct Instruction coordinator, said pupils move from group to group depending on their needs.
“Every child can learn with DI,” Clay said.
As part of the teacher’s script, there is a prescribed correction for when a pupil or a group of students falters.
“In the area of fluency, when there is a hesitation or if a word is missed, the teacher helps them correct the mistake and then has them go back and reread it.
“If the child knows all the words but the reading is just choppy, the teacher will read it to model fluency and then have the child read it back,” Clay said.
“In all, the teacher will go back two or three times to ensure that the child has internalized the correction.”
Also, a missed word goes on the “good-bye list,” which is the first thing reviewed the next day before the story starts.
FOCUS ON MASTERY
The Education Trust staff members who visited De Queen Elementary were struck by the school’s work on the new, national math and English/language arts standards — in contrast to what Hall said is a haphazard approach elsewhere.
“What absolutely popped for us was the care and thoughtfulness and enthusiasm with which this school is working to implement the new [standards],” Hall said.
“What you see is the leadership of the math and literacy facilitators. They dug into these standards but did it in collaborative process with their teachers. They were studying the standards, asking what does this really mean? What would it really look like if a student could truly demonstrate mastery of this kind of a standard?”
In math, the pupils in thirdthrough-fifth grades focus on the key areas of multiplication, division and fractions. Other concepts such as area, geometry and the use of data are incorporated.
“The philosophy behind the Common Core is what is right for kids,” De Queen’s math facilitator Maribeth Revel said.
“With the [state standards], we were hitting on a lot of topics. Kindergartners were spending as much time on probability as they would on the more important concept of place value. Common Core has said we are letting those things go that kindergartners are not ready for anyway and using the foundation years to build a foundation.”
The literacy curriculum ties reading, language arts, science and social studies together into thematic units, and teachers use those units exclusively to teach concepts in different disciplines, Morphew said.
A third-grade unit titled That’s So Gross included lessons on the respiratory system, a science lab on mucus, nonfiction reading on a slime fish and a poem titled “Booger Love.”
Other new units have titles like Cooking Up Fun, Hail to the Chief, Creative Thinkers, Mother Earth, Home Sweet Home, Love Is in the Air and Colonial America: The Dirty Truth, which is about daily hygiene practices.
“They are varied units, but they are always connected to the real world, and they should be very deep,” Morphew said.
Collin Davis, 11, a fifthgrader, praised the school for its helpful teachers and friendly students.
“You hardly see any arguing or any bullying,” he said. “This is really a great school to go to.”
As for academics, Collin said one of his favorite units so far was about American Indians, which included reading a book about the Cherokee tribe.
“What I thought was really fascinating was the language,” Collin said, and he told how he and his classmates used Cherokee vocabulary words to write messages on simulated animal skins, which were actually crumpled brown paper towels.
Jennifer Martin, a mother of three, said she is impressed with the school’s Direct Instruction program, the ability of students to sound out words no matter how long and the differentiated instruction for students — including her twins — based on each child’s needs. She also praised the school’s “awesome” musical programs and the teachers’ refusal “to accept mediocrity.”
“Our school has found a way to put learning into every situation but make it fun so the kids don’t think they are stuck there,” Martin said.
De Queen Elementary achieved the national award without extraordinary financial resources.
The district spent an average of $9,283 per pupil in 2010-11, which ranked 111th among the state’s 239 school districts, according to Arkansas Department of Education statistics. The average salary for a teacher in the De Queen district was $49,954, according to the state data.
Phillips said she was surprised by the Dispelling the Myth honor and the funds provided to allow her and two staff members to attend The Education Trust annual conference.
“They checked us out,” Phillips said. “They called us and said we had won the award.
“I didn’t know there was an award attached [to the visit.] I thought it was just great that someone had recognized the hard work everyone had done. The award was just like whipped cream on top of the cake.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/30/2012