School aims for transformation

$6.8M grant to help LR’s Baseline Elementary bounce back

Jonathan Crossley, the new principal at Baseline Elementary School, works Thursday at the Little Rock district’s Instructional Resource Center as he prepares to interview teacher candidates.
Jonathan Crossley, the new principal at Baseline Elementary School, works Thursday at the Little Rock district’s Instructional Resource Center as he prepares to interview teacher candidates.

Little Rock’s Baseline Elementary School — labeled as an “academically distressed” school because of years of low pupil test scores on state exams — started this summer as the proverbial blank canvas.

The principal’s post and more than two dozen other faculty positions were vacated and opened to new applicants.

Little Rock School District leaders say they are now transforming the 1975-built, single-story, flat-roofed school in the heart of the city’s Hispanic community into a community-embraced “academy” where neighborhood children will achieve academic success despite any economic and language challenges they have.

“We’re determined, that by the end of this school year, Baseline will be one of the most requested schools in this district,” said Sadie Mitchell, the district’s associate superintendent for elementary education.

Mitchell most recently spearheaded the design of Roberts Elementary and the Forest Heights Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Academy.

Baseline is one of the six academically distressed schools that caused the Arkansas Board of Education in January to vote to take control of the entire 24,000-student Little Rock School District, action that included dismissing the locally elected School Board.

Baseline’s statistics are daunting.

Over the three-year period of 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14, fewer than half of the Baseline pupils — 46.28 percent — scored at proficient on state Benchmark exams in math and literacy.

Almost 53 percent of Baseline pupils this past year were categorized as “limited English proficient,” which was the highest percentage of English-language learners in any of the district’s 48 schools.

Nearly all of Baseline pupils qualified for free and reduced-price school meals, an indicator of family poverty.

To aid in the school’s transformation, a new principal — 2014 Arkansas Teacher of the Year Jonathan Crossley — is now on board at Baseline.

An education plan that hits hard on all aspects of literacy and incorporates tried-and-true instructional strategies for non-native English-language learners has state approval.

All the faculty positions are being advertised on the district’s website, and, if the applicants are bilingual, so much the better.

The new hires will report in just a few weeks for training that is customized to the Baseline plan and will continue through the year, occasionally on Saturdays.

And the piece de resistance is the federal School Improvement Grant of $6.8 million over five years announced this past week to pay for extra staff, technology pieces and a 90-minute extension to the traditional school day.

Starting in August, school hours for children at Baseline Elementary will be 7:50 a.m. to 4:05 p.m.

“That is something that every elementary school in this district has been asking for,” Mitchell said of the extra instructional time. “We couldn’t afford it without the grant.”

In comparison, other elementary schools dismiss for the day about 2:30 p.m.

Linda Young, the district’s director of grants and program development, said the grant application was initially submitted last year and denied, then resubmitted this year to complement the educational plan that district leaders had devised for Baseline.

The grant allows the district to supplement the staff as a way to expand services to students and parents.

“It’s a turnaround model for school improvement,” Young said of the grant plan. “Rapid, ramped-up, academic achievement and programming that involve parents and communication form the core.”

New features of the school include the establishment of two English as a Second Language transition classrooms, each staffed with a teacher and an aide, said Karen Broadnax, district director of the district’s English as a Second Language program.

One classroom for kindergarten through second grade and the other for third through fifth grade are for students such as recent immigrants who need what Broadnax called “a sheltered environment to learn so much English language in a short amount of time.”

“Baseline has never had that type of classroom, but there is a demonstrated need when we look at the levels of language proficiency of new students,” Broadnax said.

“It really supports students who have had gaps in their schooling or no previous schooling. They will still learn content but will have the safety net of a smaller classroom with a teacher and someone who can work with them in small groups or one to one.”

Another new piece will be two home-focused school advisers at the school.

Both will serve as a bridge between the school and parents to engage parents in their child’s school, Broadnax said. The home-focused advisers, for example, will contact a parent if a child has been absent or is otherwise struggling to determine what is needed to help the child. They will also assist in setting up phone conversations with parents and sending home information.

Separate from the home school advisers will be the job of a translator — in essence, a bilingual communications director who can reach out to the parents, community and the media.

“We can’t have enough bodies on the ground who can speak Spanish on this campus,” Broadnax said.

“We’re not teaching in Spanish. We are teaching in English. But we still have to have those transitional linguistic pieces for when a parent walks in the door and needs information and does not speak English.”

The Baseline education design team, which visited Jones Elementary School in Springdale as a model school for teaching limited-English-proficient students, emphasized that instructional strategies used at Baseline will be those validated by research.

Those strategies include the Sheltered Instructional Observation Protocol, which is a routine made up of lesson preparation, lesson delivery, practice and application, and review and assessment that teachers can use in teaching pupils, including those who are learning to speak English.

Baseline pupils in general will be immersed in language and literacy-rich classrooms, with classroom libraries and places to read and write, according to the school plan. Two reading teachers will assist in carrying out the school’s efforts in literacy. Literacy skills will be taught throughout the curriculum, including in math.

Teacher instruction will be differentiated or customized to the needs and interests of individual students. The nationally used Response to Intervention model will be adopted to identify and provide different tiers of assistance to pupils who are at risk of failing.

The Middlebury Interactive Language software is being acquired for use in fourth and fifth grades at Baseline. Online courses, songs, games and practice activities will enable the students to develop language acquisition and comprehension.

Crossley said he wants Baseline to show increased student achievement and sustain it over time. He said “spikes” in achievement are annoying.

“If we can create a system where we have autonomy for our teachers and our staff, and we have continual development and mastery, and we have a purpose attached to that — if we can do that — we are going to create a system … of sustained success.

“Rapid success? Sure. Short-term success? Sure. But I’m talking five, six years down the road, ‘What will it look like?’”

Crossley, 27, of Gaffney, S.C., a political science major and walk-on basketball player at the University of South Carolina, took a nontraditional route into the principalship through the Teach for America system and a five-year stint as a high school teacher in the Palestine-Wheatley School District. He recently earned a master’s degree in educational administration from Arkansas Tech University at Russellville.

“The team here has been so wonderful,” he said earlier this week about the Little Rock job. “It’s not ‘If we will be successful,’ but ‘When?’ We’re dedicated to that cause. Opening up lines of communication and creating a culture of acceptance are vital to that.”

The new principal is a first-generation college graduate. He said he wants his legacy in education to be about providing equitable educational opportunities to students.

“ZIP code should not determine the quality of your education,” he said. “I’m on fire about that. I want to see students in Arkansas and specifically at Baseline achieve at the highest level possible.”

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