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Moton in motion
By LOGAN NEILL Four years ago, the state Department of Education delivered disappointing news to the faculty and staff of Moton Elementary School. According to the results of FCAT testing, the Brooksville school had earned a D ranking, lowest in the county. The next three years saw a vast improvement in Moton's academic performance. The school earned C grades two years in a row, before finally landing its first A ranking in the 2001-02 year. Though Moton's faculty and staff lauded that progress, many still felt there was room for improvement. With the help of an innovative comprehensive education program called the Modern Red Schoolhouse, Moton Elementary recently embarked on an effort it hopes will help teachers to more effectively educate its students. "Even though we've done well the past two or three years, we all knew that we couldn't just rest on our laurels," said Moton principal Donnie Moen. "We felt we needed to find a way to take the best aspects of our school and make them more progressive in how we teach every day." Last spring, the school signed a three-year contract with the Nashville-based Modern Red Schoolhouse Institute, which developed a teaching concept based on what it calls the "little red schoolhouse of yesteryear". The program focuses on the development of a school's curriculum as it serves students of a particular community. Funded by a $440,000 grant from the federal Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program, the company began working with teachers last spring in areas such as analyzing classroom practices, community involvement and tailoring more toward academic needs of the entire student body. By championing such concepts as performance-based evaluations and scoring guides, teachers receive a broader, more inclusive view as to what works in their classrooms, said Sue Hegedus, Moton Elementary's Title I lead teacher. She was appointed to help implement the program in her school. "By precisely studying what we're doing in the classroom, we get an insight to help guide us to make certain all children can succeed," said Hegedus. "I think that giving teachers a bigger role in that process makes it easier for them to watch their student's progress and to figure out ways to help them more." The Modern Red Schoolhouse program puts particular emphasis on pre and post testing, which, according to fifth-grade teacher Phyllis Haas, "forces you to look at the data and make adjustments to your lesson plan." After repeated attempts at an assessment test, students can be assigned additional tutoring or small-group instruction. The benefit, Haas says, is that slower students are less likely to be left behind in their studies. Haas, who is the school's fifth-grade team leader, also directs a task force that monitors education standards and assessments to make sure that curriculum changes abide by county and state benchmarks. Though she said that the program helped introduce new teaching concepts, Haas was pleased to learn that the Modern Red Schoolhouse plan didn't call for a complete makeover of her school's curriculum. "They were smart because they saw that our math, reading and writing programs were, for the most part, working very well," said Haas. "A lot of the teachers respected that the company didn't need to uproot the school in order to make its program work." While Moen acknowledges that his school is still a year or two away from fully implementing the Modern Red Schoolhouse program, he has heard much positive feedback from his staffers. "I guess the biggest criticism I've heard is that it's been a lot of hard work to get it up and running," said Moen. "But I don't think that it's such a bother, really. Anything worthwhile is going to be hard work."
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From today's Hernando Times Letters |
