FITCHBURG, January 14, 2007— Kendra Engel's fifth-graders will soon venture into senior centers and nursing homes, seeking memories of the Great Depression.
Students will interview senior citizens who lived through the Depression, then paint the seniors' portraits and write biographies based on their stories.
Engel teaches at Fitchburg Arts Academy, which is tucked away on the fourth floor of the Academy Middle School building, on Academy Street.
"Our focus is both learning about the arts, and learning through the arts," said Les Edinson, FAA's principal.
The school has 140 fifth- through eighth-graders, 10 full-time teachers, a guidance counselor and a principal.
FAA, formerly the Museum Partnership School, became a "pilot school" this past fall.
That means the school's governing board -- comprised of teachers, parents and community members -- develops FAA's operating budget and decides how to run the school.
"It gives us a great deal of autonomy," Edinson said in an interview last week in his office. "The people who are closest to kids can make decisions that affect the kids."
FAA is the first -- and currently, the only -- pilot school launched outside Boston since the pilot school program began in 1995.
But Fitchburg could soon house another pilot school, and in the same building, too, if teachers at Academy Middle School vote Tuesday that they want go continue with plans to convert Academy to a "Commonwealth pilot school," a slightly different breed of schools in which the state more closely monitors test scores and other school practices.
No quantitative data exists yet to track FAA's progress, but anecdotally, teachers and parents say they are generally pleased.
Fitchburg's pilot school received $824,217 this year from the district's budget, according to Superintendent Andre Ravenelle.
This "lump-sum budget" is the district's average per-pupil spending for middle schoolers, multiplied by the number of students at FAA. All pilot schools' budgets are determined this way.
Their own decisions
Amy Richard is the art teacher at Fitchburg Arts Academy, and served on the design team that worked for more than a year to plan the pilot school.
She also taught at the school's previous incarnation as MPS.
"I think the biggest change is we're more able to work together," Richard said last week in her classroom, while the students were at lunch. "We now have a principal and a full staff, and we can make our own decisions."
Richard works with all the other teachers at FAA and integrates art into their lessons.
In one sixth-grade project, students studied global warming in their science classes, wrote persuasive letters on the topic in their English classes and then designed posters with Richard.
In another project, students designed a city park, and drew it on graph paper in math class.
Students also kept nature journals, which taught them about sketching techniques, but also about the animals and plants they observed.
The students also participate in "focus guilds" each Friday, which are activities such as knitting, sewing and engineering.
Jocelyn Casker, 12, sat against the wall in a corner of Engel's classroom last week, reading to herself. Other students leaned on pillows propped against a back wall or clustered in small groups at tables, reading aloud to each other.
Casker recently completed a month of the engineering focus guild, in which she and her peers built mousetrap cars.
Her group used CDs as wheels, and tied a string around the trap's spring.
"We were the first group to get it to work," the sixth-grader said. "We had to keep cutting the string to add more tension."
This taught them about teamwork and problem solving.
"You really learn your strengths and weaknesses. You have to find if you can work with other people," Casker said.
Different rules
The school didn't come together overnight.
A design team of parents and teachers met for more than a year to plan the school. A steering committee then continued the work, which teachers and parents say is still evolving.
Teachers at pilot schools must sign an election-to-work agreement with the district's school committee, which stipulates teachers' work conditions.
They still receive union salary, benefits and accrual of seniority in the district, but they are exempt from other union work rules.
In FAA's case, teachers agreed to work 90 additional hours each year, without extra pay, said Bourbeau, who is also president of the Fitchburg Teachers Association.
Teachers also agreed to extra paid professional development during the summer.
The transition to a pilot school requires "leaps of faith" by all those involved, said School Committee member Lisa Moison, who served on the school's design team. Her daughter is a sixth-grader at FAA.
"The union has to give up some control over the employees, and the school committee has to give up their control over the budget, and the administration has to give up the day-to-day control over the school," Moison said in a phone interview this week. "Everybody kind of does a little leap, and then you let the school grow."
Moison said she's noticed concrete changes this year. For one, class periods increased from 40 minutes to an hour, which lets students delve deeper into their projects.
But there's a shift in attitude, too.
"I know, as a parent, I can see some huge differences," she said. "The academics are more rigorous. My daughter knows more what's expected of her, day-to-day."
Not enough money?
Jay Thiel, a Townsend resident whose sixth-grade daughter attends FAA through the district's school choice program, also sat on the design team.
He agreed that art is blended more deeply into the classroom at FAA than it was at MPS. Having a separate principal, rather than sharing one with B.F. Brown Middle School, is also a plus.
But he said the school's budget -- as with that of other Fitchburg schools -- is too small.
"The problem with capitalizing a new school is going to be a continual challenge," Thiel said in a phone interview last week. "There's very little funding."
With increased flexibility, some might argue that teachers can too easily stray from material needed for students to pass the state's standardized test, the MCAS.
It's too soon to compare FAA's MCAS scores with those at other schools in the district, since this is the school's first year as its own entity.
But Edinson and Engel said they're confident in their students' abilities.
"We're assuming, that if we get kids engaged in a substantive learning experience, and a rich curriculum, that they will do well on the MCAS," the principal said. "Yes, the skills are important, but it's not only the skills; it's knowing how to use them."
Test scores can go up from "really making (students) use their brain, not just memorize," Engel said.
Smaller classes also help, because teachers can address children's individual needs. She teaches classes of between 16 and 20 students.
The district's other three middle schools have an average of about 23 students per class, according to information provided by the superintendent's office.
Another key to a pilot school's character is parent involvement, the principal said.
"Parents are here because they choose this school for their kids," he said. "We do have a group of parents that I think are pretty savvy and pretty active."
The school also has multiple partnerships that help it succeed, Edinson said.
The school works with the Fitchburg Art Museum, with a national organization called Expeditionary Learning, and with the Center for Collaborative Education, an organization in Boston that helps create pilot schools. |
