THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605170037
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Magruder Primary School in Newport News is a success story to take your breath away. Its record of accomplishment is all the more impressive because Magruder is the kind of school too often pointed to as a doomed enterprise.
Magruder is a public school, and we all know they can't work. Its neighborhood is the impoverished East End. Strike two. Its students are largely minority. And a huge 84 percent of them are officially described as economically disadvantaged. Finally, their parents have all the problems to be expected in the circumstances.
Yet Magruder has refused to live down to the stereotype. It isn't a failure, a holding tank for the dysfunctional as they move from a childhood on welfare to an adulthood behind bars. On the contrary, Magruder is a winner. Specifically, it is one of only 56 schools in the country to be designated a Title I Distinguished School.
Magruder hasn't always been a shining example. In fact, as recently as 1992 an abysmal 1 percent of second-grade pupils were reading at grade level or above. By last year, however, Magruder could boast of 80 percent reading at or above grade level.
If Magruder hadn't just won a prestigious award for the feat, it would be reasonable to assume such a statistic to be a typographical error. From 1 percent to 80 percent in four years? Impossible! But it happened. And other schools could learn from Magruder's example.
Michael Williams-Hickman is Magruder's principal, and she deserves a lot of the credit for the turnaround. Before coming to Magruder she was principal of what she describes with a laugh as ``an uptown school.'' Confronted with Magruder's problems, Williams-Hickman decided the only hope was to focus on essentials. And she believed, rightly, that nothing is more essential than reading. If students can do that, they can do anything. So she rallied the staff behind the goal of making readers of Magruder students.
Government money helped. Title I funds are available to schools with a large disadvantaged population. Magruder qualified for $400,000 in 1992-93 and $231,000 in each of the next two years. That translates into roughly $900 and $500 per student in extra annual funding. Magruder also received First Step federal money that helps get at-risk 4-year-olds up to speed for kindergarten.
With the Title I funds, the school was able to hire three specially trained reading-recovery teachers and to pay for in-school staff development. A home-school coordinator was hired to contact parents. Seven full-time teachers' assistants were also added. Each spends the morning in one classroom, the afternoon in another. That improves the teacher-student ratio in 14 classrooms.
This year, the reading-recovery program is providing tailor-made tutoring programs to 163 first-graders who are reading below grade level. Each child is individually assessed and gets 30 minutes a day with a reading-recovery specialist for 12 to 20 weeks.
The outreach program encourages parents to read with their children and to become part of the school community. A parents' library loans books for home reading. A banker has held a money-management class in school for parents. A psychologist has hosted a program for grandparents who are primary caregivers to discuss the special difficulties they face.
The results speak for themselves, but the elements leading to them are worth reiterating. A principal willing to lead. A dedicated staff energized by a mission. Money to provide better teacher-student ratios and reading specialists. Individual attention for those who need it. A partnership between parents and school.
Can the Magruder success be repeated? Undoubtedly. But it will require more principals like Williams-Hickman, school systems prepared to focus intensely on the essentials and enough money to do the one-on-one teaching needed to get lagging readers up to speed. There's no magic to making schools work, but the solution is labor intensive. It demands good people and enough of them, hence money.
This region ought to be trying to create dozens of Magruder Primary Schools. But the real question, alas, isn't whether there will be more Magruders but whether the existing Magruder will survive. Title I money is about to run out. Magruder will need a new grant. But Title I is almost as much at risk as Magruder's students. Congress may cut or kill the program.
The hard-won victories of schools are ephemeral. If there isn't a commitment to starting all over every year with a new batch of children at risk, today's success story can become only a memory, the 80 percent reading rate can become the 99 percent failure rate - again. The choice is ours. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB