(originally published in Feb. 4, 2010, Denver Herald-Dispatch)
(From the Archives about Charles M. Schenck (CMS) Community School)
In Denver, schools have open enrollment, so parents and children can choose which schools they want to go to, including outside their neighborhood. This means that neighbors, friends and former classmates might go to different schools, especially when they transition from elementary to middle school or middle school to high school. This also means that some schools can't predict exactly what their students will need as they move ahead through the school stages because each school is different.
Abraham Lincoln High School Principal Antonio Esquibel wants to change that. He wants students and families to plan on attending Lincoln and then going off to college – and start planning to attend Lincoln and then college when they start elementary school.
Antonio Esquibel, principal, Abraham Lincoln High School
Vertical integration – when different grade levels work together – is pushed on a general level and practiced inside individual school levels. But it's rare among different levels of schools and even rarer among multiple levels.Esquibel wants to make it happen.
And he's got money to do it and make it a formal process.
The “Lincoln Collaborative” – comprising Lincoln High School, Kepner Middle School, CMS Community School (formerly Schenck) and Godsman Elementary – was approved by Denver Public Schools to get a $375,000 grant for the next two years to work on this project.
If the schools show that the grant is working, the district will release another $550,000 of the grant, a total of about $925,000 for five years.
“This grant will allow us to focus our efforts in a lot of different areas,” Esquibel said. “It's all about getting our kids ready for college in a more systemic way. The district allows for some of this to happen. This grant gives us flexibility for us to do it the way we want to do it.”
Money will pay for extra training for teachers, for teachers and other administrators to meet, and for communication and marketing to families.
There are about 3,600 students, from pre-school through high school, enrolled at the four schools this school year, according to the executive summary.
“If I'm a parent and I have a 4-year-old and I go to CMS, I can ask, 'What can you tell me about my 4-year-old by the time he gets out of Denver Public Schools?' We can show that now in a more calculated way,” said Kepner Principal Frank Gonzales. “We feel we came up with some answers. We can tell parents, 'If you leave your child with us and they continue from fifth grade, they will have all of these skills ready by middle school. When they leave middle school, they will be prepared for high school.'”
By 2014, when the full grant would run out, Lincoln's goal is to increase the percent of students graduating from high school from 68 to 80 percent and to reduce the percent of students who need remediation when they get to college from 78 to 30 percent.
Pat Hurrieta, principal, Godsman Elementary School
The focus for these schools is due to the district's recent general failing in preparing Hispanic students for post-high school educational success. Across the district only 39 percent of eligible Hispanic students went to college from 2002-07 – compared with 71 percent of white students – and half of the Hispanic students dropped out of college within six years, according to the executive summary.
“We're all sending the same message: If you come to our schools, we're going to prepare you for college,” Esquibel said. “If parents enroll their kids in these schools, we're going to make it a priority to prepare them for college.”
Each school would have a group that would meet every other week composed of the principal, an assistant principal, 8-12 teachers, 2-3 other staff members, parents and students. A cohort of representatives from all schools plan to meet about monthly.
“As elementary schools, we pretty much stick to our elementary school. This will provide for an additional push for communication with other levels,” said Pat Hurrieta, Godsman principal.
For the extra money to kick in, all of the schools need to show improvement in learning, attendance, enrollment, behavior and safety, graduation and college remediation.
Kristin Nelson-Steinhoff, principal, CMS Community School
“What we're really going to be doing now is elevating our conversation and include our school staff,” said Kristin Nelson-Steinhoff, CMS principal. “I'm hoping we're going to be able to branch out and connect not only our teachers but also our communities. We all are working with the same community, the same set of students. If we were all on different pages and doing different things, we wouldn't serve the community as well as we could. When those transitions aren't smooth, kids are more at risk of not succeeding and dropping out from school.”
Students are more frustrated and bored when they go through a basic lesson that's exactly what they already know or learn something completely different from a structure they were comfortable and successful with before. The principals are hopeful that won't happen.
“We can figure out how we can align our curriculum better. We can know the instruction and strategies that we use,” Equibel said. “We can set expectations: what do we expect kids to do and master at the end of fifth grade and at the end of eighth grade? When students hit those grade-level milestones, they'll be prepared for the next level.”
Gonzales and Esquibel had been talking about college preparation since Esquibel took over as head of the high school about four years ago. But elementary schools weren't directly connected until Esquibel, Gonzales and a University of Denver professor met with principals of eight other schools in the fall of 2008. That initial group worked for six months determining needs, and the “Lincoln Collaborative” spawned from it.
“The biggest benefit to the community is that our kids will hear the same language from pre-school all the way through high school,” Hurrieta said. “I don’t think that’s always been a huge push in the elementary level. We always just wanted to make sure they get through middle school successfully or get to high school.
“Now we're talking about college. Our parents don’t really hear it. If they hear it for 12 years, it will be a reality.”
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