10 years later students recall a 'special year'

Ten years ago the 23 students knew they were doing something different. Now they know just how innovative their teacher was.

By STEPHEN HEGARTY

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 20, 2000

ELFERS -- The slightly faded video showed small children acting out a school lesson. As the kids stiffly delivered their lines, high school students gathered around a TV chuckled and then shrieked as they recognized new faces on the screen. At times, the teens became eerily silent.

[Times photo: Janel Schroeder] Teacher Maria Houmis, left, shares memories with former student Jessica Alessandrini at a reunion at Mittye P. Locke Elementary.

They were watching themselves.

The video was from a decade ago, a memory of a school year when their teacher took a chance, and she and 23 children spent a magical year together.

"I remember knowing, even as a kid, that what we were doing was something special," said Christine Mendonca, 17, now a senior at Gulf High School. "And I knew some people didn't think it would work -- because it was different."

Christine was one of nine teens, now nearing graduation, who gathered recently at their old school, Mittye P. Locke Elementary, for a reunion with their former teacher, Maria Houmis.

What Houmis did seems routine now: She mixed first-, second- and third-graders in one classroom. Today, roughly two-thirds of Pasco elementary school children attend a multigrade class.

But in 1990, the idea was unusual, untested, unproven.

"At the time people looked at me and asked, "Your son is doing what?' " recalled Lou Ann Morrow, whose son Andrew was a third-grader in Houmis' class. "It was hard to explain because it was new."

During the reunion it became clear what key elements made this classroom innovation work. And during a time when public schools seem to be constantly embracing or retreating from one new idea or another, these elements often seem to be overlooked.

"Even the best idea won't work unless you have a great teacher -- and that teacher has built up trust," said Mary Giella, who at the time was Pasco's assistant superintendent for instruction.

"Parents, they didn't trust what those guys in the district office were saying," Giella said, referring to herself and the task forces she convened in the late 1980s. "But even if they didn't trust us, they trusted a teacher they knew. She made it work."

Walk into an elementary school classroom in Pasco County and chances are you will find children from different grades learning together. At Lake Myrtle Elementary, first-graders read next to third-graders. At Centennial Elementary, fourth-graders work on multiplication tables with third-graders.

But in the late 1980s, multi-age classes were just one of several ideas the district was kicking around.

A task force was considering the approach, which mixed several traditional grades in a single classroom, under the assumption that kids learned best at their own pace. Soon it would be time to try it out at a school or two, after finding the right principals and the right teams of teachers.

Maria Houmis was thinking along the same lines.

After 15 years in the classroom, the elementary school teacher was ready to try something different. What she had in mind sounded a lot like an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse.

It would mean a lot more work for her, teaching children of different ages and abilities. But a friend of hers was trying something similar in Sebring, and she urged Houmis to try it out.

"I'm not the kind of person who can sit around and do the same thing over and over," Houmis said. "I knew it would work. I did the research. I did the planning."

Houmis said she was unaware that a districtwide task force was exploring similar ideas. Had she known, though, she said she doubts she would have had the patience to wait it out.

She went to work on her principal, who reacted cautiously.

"I think any time you try something new, people are a little apprehensive," said Locke Elementary principal Dennis Taylor, who still runs the school. "I know we had to talk about it a little bit. I needed to know all the details. But I'm willing to try new things. I trusted her."

Then Houmis selected a group of children of varying abilities and got to work on their parents. Some of the children she selected; some were assigned to her.

"She explained it to me, and told me to think about it," recalled Alice Surace, whose daughter Crystal was a third-grader with Houmis. "I didn't have to think about it long. I knew it would work because of the kind of teacher she was."

Not everyone bought into it so quickly.

"I had teachers roll their eyes and tell me I must be going through a change in life," Houmis recalled.

The experiment started with the 1990-91 school year. Houmis had five first-graders, eight second-graders and 10 third-graders, ranging in age from 6 to 9.

Houmis said she was prepared to "teach up to the kids who were ready for it, and teach down to the kids who needed it." But she was pleased to see that "I taught up and they all went up."

Once it became clear that things were going well, Houmis' class saw a steady stream of visitors: administrators from the district office, teachers from other schools, the superintendent.

It's hard to say what made the classroom work so well and what has made multigrade classrooms flourish in Pasco. Houmis swears that the mixing of different ages creates an environment where kids help each other and where there is no embarrassment for children who need a little more time to master a lesson.

"The kids were excited about learning," Houmis said. "We all learned together."

Giella at the district office was keeping an eye on Houmis' experiment. Giella's task force was preparing a variation on the multigrade approach at several schools for the following year, including Centennial and Pasco Elementary.

The district's version differed from Houmis' one-room-schoolhouse approach, in that it involved teams of teachers who work with several classes of children from different grades. The teachers (all of them volunteers) were being lined up. The concept was being explained to parents, who could choose to take part or decline.

How did Houmis' experiment affect those plans?

"The more people who saw what Maria was doing, the easier my job became," Giella said. "People could see that it was working."

The 10-year reunion was the students' idea. As they neared graduation, a couple of kids from Houmis' 1990-91 class realized that tiny slice of their childhood was a very significant time. They wanted to relive some of it.

Of the original 23 children, nine attended the reunion in the Locke Elementary media center. Some students had moved away. One couldn't be found. A couple of students who couldn't make it were represented by their parents.

"Everything is compared to that class," said Natalie Seelie, 16, now a senior at Gulf High School. "I'm in AP (advanced placement) English now, and I'm, like, this is fun, but it's not as fun as third grade."

"It's not like I don't like school, but when you're young it's not like that's what you want to do every day," said Amanda Golub, now a junior at River Ridge High School. "But I sincerely can't remember a day when I didn't want to go to school in Mrs. Houmis' class."

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