Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 14, 1994 TAG: 9405160007
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
Parents of selected children will be notified in June.
The demonstration project will be a "school within a school." It will be located at Dublin Elementary School, with John Wenrich and Maria Nash as its co-coordinators and John Hocker, Cynthia Anderson, Eilene Simpkins and Pam Selleck as lead teachers.
They have been building the project all year, working after their regular teaching hours with other school system officials, Superintendent Bill Asbury told the Pulaski County School Board Thursday night.
The purpose of the demonstration school is to try new techniques aimed at creating lifelong learners on a small scale, Wenrich said.
``We will be demonstrating a high degree of access to technology for both teachers and students,'' he said. ``This will provide an opportunity for in-service training for current teachers as well as training for preservice teachers from local universities.''
Instructors will teach skills such as collecting, organizing, analyzing, evaluating and communicating all types of information through computers and other advanced technology, Wenrich said.
``Students who learn to read during the early years will read to learn in later years. As teachers in the demonstration school, we hope to teach life-long learning through a change in habits of mind,'' he said.
The school will be located in six classrooms in Dublin Elementary's current fifth-grade wing. It is scheduled to open in August, and will be observed by representatives of other schools both in the county and region.
``That's why it's called `demonstration,'" Asbury said. ``We're venturing out on a limb that not many have been on before ... There's a lot of excitement about the program.''
Part of the plan includes using student teachers from Radford University.
Virginia Tech also is interested in having its students intern at the school, and Wallace Bruce, principal of Dublin Elementary, has contacted local businesses to serve as education partners.
The students chosen for the school are not from the gifted segment or any other group. They were selected through a random process aimed at getting a cross-section of all types of students.
Asbury said parents could opt ``not to take advantage of this program, and that's OK.'' If any of the selected students drop out, replacements would be picked by the same lottery method.
``There is widespread agreement that America's public schools need modernization,'' Wenrich told the board. ``In an era of the global economy, when information technology has revolutionized the way business, higher education and, increasingly, governments communicate, schools still rely for the most part on traditional methods of teaching and learning inherited from the industrial age.''
Also on Thursday, principals from two elementary schools reported to the board about new learning programs started at their schools this year.
Libby Vansant of Claremont Elementary and Deborah Taylor of Northwood Elementary said the programs, which involve the merging of different subject areas and grouping students by ability rather than age, have been successful based on surveys of parents, teachers and students so far.
``Parents were more concerned than the children were,'' about some of the new approaches, Taylor said. But those concerns have been eased as the parents see how well their children are learning.
``Next year we want to do more,'' she said. ``We want to move along the line of integrating our curricula. ... We also want to do a better job of identifying skill levels.''
``We're going to be teaching completely across the curricula rather than in segmented sessions,'' Vansant said.
In other business, school officials estimate that the system will have $408,000, about 1 percent of its total 1993-94 budget, left at the end of the year. Assuming that figure holds up, the board approved a list of capital expenditures for that money.
They include laptop computers, some playground equipment for Critzer Elementary School, 500 folding chairs and a new yellow bus to replace the 1981 burgundy ``Cougar'' activity bus, which has more than 100,000 miles on it.
by CNB