Farmington/ New Tibbetts Middle School Undergoes Indoor Construction During Winter
By Joshua Kellogg
Farmington Daily-Times
December 26, 2012
With snow on the ground, construction workers at the new Tibbetts Middle School have been focusing their attention on the interior of the building as the project approaches completion.
Assistant Superintendent of Operations James Barfoot said Jaynes Companies, contracted to build the school, is approximately 75 percent complete.
The estimated budget for the two-story building and adjoining facilities is $34 million, with the school district picking up roughly $14 million of the project and $20 million provided by the state.
Giant heaters have been placed at specific points within the school to maintain a warm temperature for future work on the Twin Peaks Boulevard campus.
- "What they are worried about right now is keeping the building warm, because the floors have to be a certain temperature to lay tile," Barfoot said.
The building is roughly 98,000 square feet according to Barfoot, about 8,000 square feet larger than the current Tibbetts building, which is showing its age.
- "That staff at Tibbetts, they have been in that building for 76-77 years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president when we built that building," Barfoot said. "Some of those teachers have been down there in the old building for 20 years, they deserve a new building."
During a walk-through, workers were painting the walls in the gym and moving their elevated work platform through the front lobby applying another coat of paint around the windows facing the south side of the building.
- Walking down one of the hallways visitors can see major work completed with lockers lining the walls and workers installing ceiling panels with strings of temporary lights guiding their way.
- A peek into one of the classroom showed dry-erase boards installed with large floor-to-ceiling windows providing illumination.
In fact, the hallways are the only areas without direct light as big windows line the stairwells, classrooms and the cafeteria, allowing copious amounts of sunlight into the building.
- "We put a lot of windows in it to take advantage of the views out there," Barfoot said. "You can see Mount Hesperus, you can see Arizona from there and the Chuska's (mountain range)."
Barfoot's favorite thing about the design of the building is how the floor plan of the school forms a "V" like shape, allowing school officials to have a clear line of sight down both hallways.
"As the school principal, you can stare down there and down to this other wing," Barfoot said. "You can see if kids are acting up or getting into a fight."
Workers have completed installation of electricity, sewer, gas and water lines. Connections for phone and data communications still must be finished.
New Tibbetts Middle School is being constructed to accommodate 650 students, with about 500 students currently taking classes at the old building at 312 E. Apache.
The new building will factor into the 2013-2014 school year redistricting plans for Farmington's four middle schools.
"We are redistricting to level out the middle schools," Barfoot said. "A few years ago - two to three - Tibbetts was only (at) 425 students and Hermosa (Middle School) had 125 more (students) than Tibbetts and Heights (Middle School) had 200 more students than Tibbetts."
To date, $190,000 in student furniture has been ordered with student and teacher desks and chairs taking up the bulk of the order.
Barfoot said he was excited that the building was nearing completion.
"I like when they get into the interior, I like seeing the cabinets, the lockers are in there, it starts looking student-ready then," Barfoot said.
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Rio Rancho/ RRPS Seeks to Avert Boundary Issue for Maggie Cordova Elementary Students
By Elaine D. Briseño
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
December 27, 2012
The Rio Rancho school district is hoping to avoid, for now, a major elementary attendance boundary overhaul by offering transportation to Maggie Cordova families who want to enroll their young children in the Montessori program at Sandia Vista Elementary.
- While Maggie Cordova is packed with more than 1,000 students,
- Sandia Vista has 15 empty classrooms and only 540 students.
Maggie Cordova is in the southwest part of town near the Cabezon subdivision, which has seen tremendous growth in the past five years. Sandia Vista is near the Enchanted Hills subdivision in northeast Rio Rancho.
Currently, the Montessori program is open to the district's preschool, kindergarten and first-grade students, but parents who don't live within the Sandia Vista boundaries must transport their children to and from the school. Children can stay in the program through fourth grade but must enter the program by first grade.
Superintendent Sue Cleveland told the board this month that Sandia Vista is one of the few public schools in the country to offer a Montessori program. It is, she said, a way to offer parents more education choices.
She and Sandia Vista staff have been discussing using the program to help attract parents from overcrowded Maggie Cordova by offering transportation. And school principal Patricia Cruz said if Maggie Cordova families enrolled their younger children into the Montessori program, the school would provide transportation to the older children, who would be enrolled in a traditional classroom.
- "We would like to market the program to parents at Maggie Cordova to help with the overcrowding there," she said. "We would like to offer these families transportation. That is the biggest obstacle for parents who want to use the program."
Cleveland said if the transportation department can figure out a way to make it work, the district may be able to avoid redrawing its elementary school boundaries. This becomes necessary as the population in the city shifts over time, leaving some schools with larger enrollment than others.
She said increased enrollment at Sandia Vista would mean the school could have a full-time nurse and PE teacher. Currently, the school receives only enough money for those positions to be part time.
Cruz was before the Rio Rancho Public Schools Board this month giving a report on the program, which is in its fourth year.
"We would like to have the option to expand," she said. "I like having a small school, but I am ready to expand."
The Montessori program varies from a traditional classroom in that students have more of a say in what they are learning on a given day. For example, a teacher may have five tasks or activities students must complete that day. Students in a Montessori class would get to choose the order in which they complete those tasks, while children in a traditional class would do the same activities at the same time.
Students are organized by age instead of grade level. At Sandia Vista, there are three groups of classrooms: primary, which is pre-K and kindergarten; lower-elementary students who would typically be in grades one and two; and upper-level elementary students who would be in a third- or fourth-grade regular classroom.
Also, Montessori classrooms are organized into work areas rather than in straight rows. Cruz said while the Montessori-style of teaching and learning is not for every teacher or student, some thrive.
Lisa Lane placed her son in the program during its inaugural year. He's now 7 and in second-grade. The family lives in Cabezon, which is within the Maggie Cordova attendance boundaries. The family initially considered enrolling their son in a private school, but finally settled on Sandia Vista.
"I knew we were taking a chance," she said. "What he started to learn in that first year just blew our minds. It's been the best decision."
Veronica Valdez, teaches one of the upper-elementary programs, although she had never before taught in a Montessori program.
"They get to choose when they want to work on something," she said. "I'm more in the background and here to guide them. I really like it because for me, this is the type of student I am."
Cruz said the school will start accepting applications for new students early next year.
"We are not forcing students from Maggie Cordova to come here," she said. "But we would like to give them that choice."
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Denver CO/ No-Quit Attitude Prevails at Mapleton Schools after Grant Money Missed
By Karen Augé
The Denver Post
December 27, 2012
Mapleton Public Schools missed winning millions of dollars in federal Race to the Top grant money earlier this month, finishing 17th in the competition which gave out 16 awards to school districts across the country.
But the district, which includes Thornton and a gritty unincorporated stretch along Denver's industrial northern border, won't be giving up.
The Mapleton district wanted $5 million each of the next four years to extend the school year and offer summer-enrichment programs, said Superintendent Charlotte Ciancio.
Assistant Superintendent Jackie Kapushian said the goal was to "shorten the breaks when kids are not in school, to support them so there is not that learning loss," that often happens over the summer.
The one Colorado school district that won a grant, St. Vrain Valley, which sits mostly in Boulder County, received $16.5 million with a plan to expand the school year, to mentor high-risk students and to broaden science, technology, engineering and math curricula.
Mapleton's application was aimed at expanding enrichment experiences similar to what Principal Candace Hyatt has been integrating into classrooms at Welby Montessori School in the Mapleton district.
After a recent field trip to the Denver Art Museum's "Becoming Van Gogh" exhibit, the students' crayon-on-construction-paper interpretations of Starry Night lent a wistful, indigo feel to the Welby School hallway.
Inside their classroom, a dozen fourth- fifth- and sixth-graders sat cross-legged on a rug, their hands shooting into the air with every question their teacher asked about the exhibit they had just seen.
"Did any of you notice anything different about the first paintings he did and the later ones?" teacher Lisa Buell asked.
"They were dark at first but the paintings got brighter and brighter," one boy answered, fairly well summing up the post-impressionist master's artistic progression.
Trips to museums are not typically on the agenda of many families in the district, where more than three-quarters of households are so impoverished that their children qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.
Extending school days, and even years, is trendy, as educators recognize that much of what they spend nine months teaching gets baked out of kids' brains during the three-month summer break, said Jennifer Sloan McCombs, an education policy researcher at the RAND Corp.
That's driven largely by what she called our "increasing expectations for kids."
But Sloan McCombs said just tacking on days isn't going to make kids smarter. "How that time is used seems to be the key," she said.
Time that's targeted to what kids need, along with good classroom-management, often determine whether extended instruction time gets results, Sloan McCombs said.
At Mapleton, "We don't want to put them in a class to do math problems all day," Ciancio said.
As the district envisioned it, summer learning would involve experiences and enrichment. "Kids who live in more affluent areas spend summer in the library or at museum programs or at camps. All those are learning experiences," Kapushian said.
But they are out of reach for most of her kids, said Hyatt.
"What you hope for over the summer is to maintain. Unless you have an enriching environment - then there might even be gains. Our kids don't have that," Hyatt said.
In Mapleton, though, they do have some experience with coming close but losing out, and trying again. Even as the district was gaining national attention for its radical remaking of failing schools, those schools' foundations were cracking, roofs were leaking, and faltering sewer pipes were spewing stench.
Still, bond proposals for money to repair aging schools or build new ones failed four times, even when state matching grants were on the table. The last one, in 2009, went down by 56 votes.
Then, in 2010, effort No. 4, a $22 million bond, passed. That opened the door for the state to chip in $31.9 million, and new, renovated, water-tight schools are now part of the landscape in Mapleton.
So they're disappointed but not discouraged and not through trying for those summer programs. Their grant application scored better than that of 355 other districts, Ciancio pointed out. So they'll take it to private donors.
"We're just going to keep our heads up and keep moving," Ciancio said.
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Washington DC/ The Great Montessori Schism
The divisive history of the popular school system, and what it teaches us about education and change
By Emily Chertoff [Producer and writer for The Atlantic's National channel]
theatlantic.com
December 26, 2012
True to its nature as an essentially religious institution, the kindergarten has undergone schisms, been rent with heresies, has been divided into orthodox and heterodox, into liberals and conservatives, although the whole body of the work has gone constantly forward, keeping pace with the increasing modern preoccupation with childhood.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, A Montessori Mother, 1916
I have fond memories of my Montessori preschool and kindergarten. Every day was like a be-bop performance - there were structures, but the players got to improvise within them. A typical Montessori day - in an American Montessori school, at least - includes large chunks of time for students to explore the classroom. Nobody told us how to play with our toys, or when. There were occasional moments of inspired weirdness (burning incense when we learned about ancient Egypt; making fake whale blubber out of marshmallows), but our teachers were sweet, the atmosphere was lovey-dovey, and I didn't have any concept of the quasi-religious fervor that can underlie alternative education theories.
Then, a few years ago, I wound up doing some in-depth research into the history of Montessori in the U.S. The infighting I turned up may say more about the true believers of alternative education in general than it does about Montessori in particular.
At least when it comes to early education, Montessori is in some ways the least alternative of the alternative education methods. Students play with carefully designed toys that a parent can easily see leading to more abstract concepts. Golden beads that teach her to count! Little round weights that introduce volume and shape! Shoe-tying! Pouring juice! This makes Montessori palatable to parents like mine, who would have allowed me to go feral sooner than send me to a Waldorf preschool to make woodcrafts and learn about Geist.
In the U.S., Montessori has two major accrediting bodies that, together, accredit or affiliate with around 4,000 schools.
- The first - Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) - was founded by Maria Montessori in 1929 in order to perpetuate her own work. Montessori started her first school, the Casa dei Bambini, in a Rome tenement in 1907. Over time, she developed a comprehensive system for teaching children through middle school, and left notes that suggested a way to adapt her ideas at a high-school level. Montessori subscribed to constructivism, a theory of education that says students do better if we let them piece together how the world works by moving through it themselves than if we deliver knowledge top-down.
Today, the organization she founded is considered the "orthodox" wing of Montessori teaching. AMI touts the continuity of instruction across its schools, and its resistance to fads. If your child switches instructors, he'll still be taught the same way. If you move, you can be assured that your new AMI school will use the same pedagogy. Short-lived trends in education won't affect how your kid learns. You'll know exactly what you're getting.
Here's the problem, as some Montessori teachers saw it, even in the 1950s: Sometimes those short-lived trends aren't short-lived, and sometimes they are not trends. As we discover more about learning, or as the times change, does the way we teach kids have to change as well? Traditionalist Montessori said no: Don't mess with the teaching method if it's working well. Some Montessori teachers weren't satisfied with that answer.
In 1953, Nancy McCormick Rambusch, an American teacher, went to an education conference in Paris, where she first encountered the Montessori method. After training in Britain, she returned to the United States to open a Montessori school in Greenwich, Connecticut. Up until that point, Montessori had taken off in countries around Europe, but unlike other imported European methods like Waldorf, it hadn't made much of a dent in the U.S.
That's because, in the early 20th century, some prominent American educators had actively discredited the Montessori method. The American philosopher and educator John Dewey, and his student William Heard Kirpatrick, thought Montessori's program stifled creativity and focused too much on the individual. Kirpatrick went on a campaign against the Montessori method in the 1920s, attacking it in a popular pamphlet. His criticisms helped keep Montessori scarce in the U.S. for about three decades.
But on the cusp of the 1960s, things were changing. Rambusch's efforts, beginning in the late 1950s, represented a fresh attempt in a few decades to introduce Montessori to the U.S. This time, it stuck, and some of the credit is probably due to her idea that the method needed to be modernized. In an influential book, lectures, and her own work as a teacher, academic, and school administrator, Rambusch focused on bringing contemporary American ideas about education into the Montessori method, creating a form of blended Montessori.
At one point in 1959, Rambusch became the U.S. representative of the AMI. In 1960, she founded the American Montessori Society, which was an American affiliate of the larger organization. But she began to fall out with Mario Montessori, Maria's daughter and the keeper of her legacy, over the reforms Rambusch wanted to make to Montessori pedagogy.
The AMS today describes the schism between it and the AMI this way:
AMS insisted that all teacher educators have a college degree so that the coursework could, potentially, be recognized by state education departments. AMS also broadened the curriculum for teachers and sought to forge inroads into mainstream education by offering Montessori coursework in traditional teacher preparation programs.
Mario Montessori disagreed with these changes, and in 1963 AMI and AMS parted ways. The two organizations have since reconciled their differences, and now enjoy a collegial relationship of mutual support and respect.
That elides a lot of history.
- In 1967, AMS sued AMI over the right to exclusively use "Montessori" as a descriptor of their schools in the U.S. They lost - the U.S. Patent Office ruled that the name was a generic descriptor of a type of schooling (which means that other, non-accredited schools are allowed to use it, too).
- The AMS's changes, and its flexibility with pedagogy, helped Montessori make inroads as a public-school teaching method. But hostilities continued between the two groups. As the above summary suggests, the groups competed from the 1970s to the 1990s for official recognition.
Today, AMS and AMI seem to agree that their fight over methods was unproductive. The two organizations have made it up, and now trumpet their work together.
Still, the conflict between the two wings of Montessori raises an important question. Should teaching methods modernize as society changes? Or should they stick, like AMI did, with a method that has worked for decades?
On balance, it's not clear that one answer is right or wrong - except maybe when it comes to dealing with changes in technology. On that score, at least, it looks like old-school AMI may be a good thing. Recent research suggests that a decrease tactile play has hurt the development of children's motor skills. If that's the case, the constructivist approach of old-school Montessori may make a good antidote, fake whale blubber and all.
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