The Dr. Seuss quote, “Congratulations! Today is your day!” fits well on the wall at Hosford Park New Tech Elementary as it receives a $1 million-plus five-year federal school improvement grant.
Dr. Seuss characters and quotes — a running theme on the colorful, upbeat bulletin boards that line the hallways of the elementary school this year — offer motivational messages for students and teachers.
“Oh, the places you will go” touts recommended sentence starters for students and staff such as “I wonder,” “I like,” “I have a need to know,” “Don’t be a flat tire” and a reminder, “The adult culture is the ceiling for the student culture.”
“This is good news for us,” said Eric Worthington, principal at the school, 4735 Arthur St., Gary. He and Julie Martoccio, counselor and dean of students, worked together to write the grant, which was announced recently.
With the funds, the school will be able to purchase enough Microsoft Surface Pros to complete a computing program for kindergarten through 5th grade and replace the outdated Promethean white boards with 65-inch HD LCD touch screen panels.
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In addition, the funds will allow them to create a new position for a data coach/teacher mentor, provide services from a home and school coordinator for parent outreach social services and add a paraprofessional to assist struggling readers.
Money from the grant will allow Worthington to provide minigrants for project-based learning efforts in classrooms and professional development for teachers. The school will also be able to use the funds to increase the support provided by the New Tech Network by having a coach make more visits to the school, he said.
“We are so elated,” said Sharon Johnson-Shirley, superintendent of the Lake Ridge New Tech Schools. “We have worked really hard to get to this point. To be able to continue these programs and not to have to worry about how to pay for them — to pay for things you know are just good for the students. It takes a little worry out of that process for Hosford Park.”
The grant is the second school improvement award for the Lake Ridge New Tech district, according to Johnson-Shirley. The middle school previously received a $738,000 grant.
“We are in our second year for the middle school grant,” said Johnson-Shirley. “We are using that grant for increased student achievement and academic success and sustainability for programs we have in place.”
Worthington, a 1990 Calumet High School graduate who grew up a mile from the school, takes note of the current student population of his school. It is highly transient, he said, and only six of his 52 fifth-graders have attended the school since kindergarten.
About 92 percent of the student body is eligible for free and reduced lunch. Worthington makes the most of the subsidized service. The high percentage of eligible students entitles the entire school body to a daily “universal breakfast.” That means everybody eats breakfast in the cafeteria before school starts.
And on Mondays, that’s when everybody celebrates at Hosford.
There’s a weekly Monday morning breakfast awards ceremony. As Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” plays in the background, announcements are made, awards are given out for the Best Bus and the Top Two Classes and happy birthday wishes are delivered to those who are another year older.
Worthington and Martoccio were jubilant as they gave each other a quick high five and talked about the 10-hour days they devoted to developing the grant earlier this summer. They had just a short window of time to put the plan together, Worthington said. The application was due on July 7.
“You have to be eligible to apply for this grant,” Worthington said. “Your school would need to have received a D or an F. We had an A one year and D the next year.”
And in this instance, that D was a million-dollar boon.
“In the 2013-14 school year, we were in the high 70s for the ISTEP and missed a C-minus by a half point,” he said.
Worthington explained the grant process requires the school’s application to create a very specific plan and attach a cost to it. Hosford Park’s proposed budget of $1.039 million was honored. It was among eight state schools to be awarded the grant money.
Worthington especially looks forward to putting a data coach/teacher mentor into place to help his staff begin to find deeper meaning in the data that is routinely collected related to everything from attendance statistics to reading competency.
A Department of Education Outreach director advised him that the school was good about collecting data at the teacher level, but needed to make it more visible — it needs to be in the air of the school.
To that end, a main hallway has a board titled “Soaring to Great Things” featuring Seuss’s Thing 1 and Thing 2 and six charts featuring each grade’s progress to its reading goal. Every classroom also posts charts where the students can notice them.
In Wendy Brown’s third-grade classroom, students keep bright blue “data folders” with pages of charts to track their progress in reading and other areas.
“They record their scores so they can see progress for themselves. Kids can work on their skills and see where they are having trouble and take ownership,” said Brown. “The teachers need to know this information to improve their instruction and we set aside time to work with kids who are struggling and who are accelerating and we’ve been doing that for some time.” She also said it helps them determine if there any trends; for example, if everyone is struggling in a particular area such as fractions.
The charting is new for the students. Part of the process involves asking the students to “notice” the information, “create goals” to improve the statistics and then “set an action plan” to reach the goals.
Nancy Coltun Webster is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.