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Elementary school emphasizes basics
By ROBERT KING © St. Petersburg Times, published January 16, 2001 BROOKSVILLE -- If you want boredom, look no further than Brooksville Elementary School. Four afternoons a week at Brooksville, students there explore the utter depths of boredom. They twiddle their thumbs. They slump in their chairs. They twist and fidget. They stare at the wall clock as if they're trying to prod the second hand faster around its course. If they're lucky, the air cooling system kicks on and off a few times, livening things up. For an 8-year-old, this is torture. At Brooksville Elementary, which this year became Hernando County's first "fundamental" school, it is called detention. And it is perhaps the biggest tool of change being wielded by a school that is demanding responsibility from its students and involvement by its parents. Brooksville Elementary certainly didn't invent detention. And hardly anything else around this fundamental school could be called revolutionary. American public schools have been telling kids to behave, to be on time for class and to do their work since the blackboard was invented. In recent years, the push to get parents more involved has become a national crusade. But Brooksville's fundamental school raises the campaign to a slightly higher level. So far, at least, teachers and parents believe it is having a positive influence on student discipline, parental involvement and -- they hope -- student learning. Detention is guaranteed to students who repeatedly fail to turn in their homework, complete their class work, show up on time or have their parents sign their daily agenda, a notebook that goes home each night and lists what is going on in class and what homework is due. There is a strict dress code. Blue jeans are forbidden. And everyone must wear shirts with solid colors and no graphics of any kind. It is intended to reduce distractions and eliminate the pressure of dressing to impress. Few have challenged the code. Recess, which was a frequent source of student injuries and confrontations, has been eliminated in favor of daily physical education classes, a more structured forum for exercise. Language arts -- the mother of all learning that includes reading, writing and spelling -- is taught in uninterrupted blocks that, for older students, can last up to 2 1/2 hours. Highlighted like this, the lineup looks daunting and even a little bit demoralizing. But, aside from a few parents who couldn't imagine an elementary school without recess, principal Sue Stoops said that she is hearing few complaints and lots of praise. Donna Cook is one parent who loves the new regimen. Cook, who recently moved from Hillsborough County, enrolled her daughter, Amy, at Brooksville in October. The family has come to appreciate the school's commitment to daily parental involvement and discipline. And Amy has had a smile on her face from Day One. "I love it," she said. This comes from a girl who found herself in detention early on after she failed to get her daily agenda signed. "It was devastating for Amy -- and very embarrassing," her mother said. But it was a lesson well learned: Amy hasn't been back to detention since. "It teaches your children responsibility," Cook said. The threat of detention is, perhaps, the biggest change at Brooksville this year. Held after school for one hour per day, four days a week, it has acquired an essential level of dread among the student body. It is so boring that children ask the supervising teachers if they can do homework. (They can't; it would diminish the boredom quotient and thus be less of a deterrent. Plus, it provides a further punishment when kids still have homework to do when they get home.) Stoops said one child called it the longest two hours of his life. The school allows some breathing room: Kids must rack up three offenses in a category (such as tardiness). And they get a clean slate every 4 1/2 weeks. But just as it is supposed to be boring for the kids, detention is supposed to be inconvenient for parents. It is held from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday. There is no detention shuttle, so kids who miss the school bus due to detention must have their parents come get them. Stoops' theory: If parents know that they will have to make a special trip for a detention pickup, perhaps they will take greater pains to ensure that their children do their homework. Though the school year is only about half over, it seems like a good theory. In September, a month into the school year, the detention population reached a peak of 36 students. There were so many kids staying late, a second classroom had to be set aside. But as parents and students grew familiar with the rules, the numbers declined. By late December, the daily detention census was five to 10 kids. On Thursday, three kids were doing time. Debbie Matherly, who works in the school's front office and manages the detention schedule, said that these "fundamental rules" have forced parents to pay more attention to their children -- to how they dress, how they study and when they arrive for school. "Parents will say, "I don't have time,' " Matherly said. "But somebody has to have time." Indeed, one mother served detention with her son because she said it was her fault that he failed to get his daily agenda book signed. The conversion of Brooksville to a fundamental school cost about $80,000. That was spent mostly on one year's salary for a new physical education teacher and a new physical education aide. Last year, kids had PE just one time every six days. Now it is a part of every day. Aside from traditional team sports such as softball and kickball, students have time for extensive physical fitness, gymnastics and training in lifelong sports like dance, golf and croquet. But the elimination of recess was probably the most controversial aspect of the transformation to a fundamental school. "You would have thought we were trying to eliminate reading," Stoops said of the initial reaction. Some still lament the demise of recess. Third-grade teacher Amber Singer knows that recess sometimes led to scraped knees or an occasional tussle. But it was also an opportunity for free social time. "They need time to express themselves and have a little bit of a break," Singer said. Still, Singer thinks that the fundamental school has succeeded in its primary goal: getting parents more involved. "They know exactly what's going on at school," she said. Not everything has gone as planned in the first year of the fundamental school. Stoops initially said that the daily, uninterrupted reading sessions would be held solely in the mornings, when kids are fresh and most ready to learn. Many classes still follow that schedule. But beginning last week, the schedule was tweaked so that many teachers now hold their focused reading time in the afternoon. The schedule -- with classes such as art, music and global studies lumped into the afternoon -- simply became too lopsided. It also required a lot of movement back and forth across campus, wasting class time. Pushing some reading classes to the afternoon is not ideal. But Stoops believes that keeping the reading time uninterrupted -- whenever it's held -- will still produce good results. Aside from being willing to alter their schedules, Brooksville's teachers have had to make some sacrifices so the fundamental school could work. There is extra paperwork in making sure that students are keeping their daily agendas updated and signed by their parents. Somebody has to supervise the new afternoon detention sessions, so each teacher agreed to donate two afternoons during the year for warden duty. And specialists, such as physical education teacher L.E. Clifford, have had to give up their free time to become reading tutors as part of Brooksville's emphasis on reading. In the mornings, five days a week, Clifford meets with a small group of struggling readers for some intense drill sessions. Instead of pushing kids to jump higher or run faster, he coaxes them to correctly pronounce the long "e" sound. Clifford has found that the lessons of coaching also apply to teaching reading. Children get frustrated with sports just as they do with reading. He has found that an encouraging word is a great salve for both endeavors. He also sees how students, like athletes, learn best and improve fastest when they are having fun. More than that, Clifford has grown closer to his students than ever before because he has more one-on-one contact with them now. "This is as rewarding to me as teaching a child to kick a ball," Clifford said. "I feel I'm a much better coach by being able to teach reading. I get to know them much better."
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