Newport News school officials trotted their state legislators through schools Wednesday, from north to south, elementary to high school, to show off some of what lawmakers and the School Board have accomplished together and to talk about hopes for the future.
And, unusually, the talk was not about specific dollars and cents. The focus was on ideas – and on surprises.
Like the surprises that came after Crittenden Middle School pupils Kailey Brown, Cole Mathes and Jordan Moody impressed state Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, state Sen.-elect Monty Mason, D-Williamsburg, and Del. David Yancey, R-Newport News, with their talk about the school’s engineering for girls program, the student Geek Squad, the in-school Bayport Credit Union mini-branch and the championship school band.
One surprise was being reminded that Crittenden is not fully accredited by the state, because it missed the threshold pass rate for the reading Standards of Learning Test.
The other, as Mason put it: “You don’t need to have a magnet school to do magnet school-like things.”
At Crittenden, Kailey highlighted a cooperative program with Newport News Shipyard that gets girls thinking about the possibility of a career in engineering. Cole talked about the squad of students who take responsibility for ensuring that school’s technology, from laptops to audio-visual equipment, is where it needs to be and ready for use – some get their parents to drive them to school early in order to do just that. Jordan, who directs the state champion school band, acts as a teller at the Bayport mini-branch.
Their presentations, delivered without a stumble, highlighted a point Superintendent Ashby Kilgore wanted to stress: her emphasis students learning to be responsible citizens in addition to academic knowledge and career preparation.
And, as she put it to the legislators over sandwiches at the new Discovery STEM Academy on Chestnut Avenue: “Time matters … space matters.”
Time, that is, like the Summer Program for Arts, Recreation and Knowledge, or SPARK, that 6,000 students participated in this year, as well as the after-school programs that Crittenden and all other city schools offer.
Space, not only in the sense of brand new buildings like the Discovery STEM Academy, but in thinking about new kinds of furnishings and equipment in older classrooms to take advantage of different approaches to teaching, she said.
“I can think of so many things happening if I had some flexibility,” she told the legislators.
Take the latest state Board of Education suggestion that state funding include more money for support staff like counselors, psychologists and social workers.
“I might not need a guidance counselor, but I might want a career counselor; I might not need a social worker but I might want a street outreach worker,” she said, noting that guidance counselors, for instance, have specific certifications.
The school system’s teams of graduation coaches, who have helped cut the number of high school dropouts from 200 a year to 38 last year, don’t have special certifications – but they’ve figured out ways to engage with students to keep them in school, she said.
The legislators saw the mix of academic and hands-on learning that students at Denbigh High School Aviation Academy experience, from a half-completed small plane they’d just installed an engine on to the electronic circuit drawing on a classroom whiteboard for which students had to calculate current losses.
They heard how legislation Yancey pushed through two years ago helped bring engineers and retired military technicians into the classrooms, and how it helped with staff for Warwick High School’s new health sciences academy. Yancey told Kilgore he’d love to see even more partnerships with city businesses to help students.
The legislators also heard how the late Sen. John Miller’s legislation to reform high school curriculum had already sparked some new thinking about career education at Heritage High School, which has created a new program for students interested in becoming firefighters.
“What I’m struck by is the innovation,” said Locke.
And that in a way was the big surprise School Board chairman Jeff Stodghill wanted to communicate, he told legislators gathered in a brightly painted, brand new classroom at the Discovery STEM.
“This,” he said, “is what going to school looks like today.”
Ress can be reached by phone at 757-247-4535.
