Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 30, 1994 TAG: 9406300104
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
Smaller classes, better testing, more parental involvement and staff development will be among their tools.
The staff development part is why the teachers spent three days of their summer at Critzer Elementary School honing these tools.
Teacher committees came up with the ideas for getting all pupils reading to the proper level by the time they enter fourth grade. They must do it by then, school Superintendent William Asbury said, "because research tells us that, if we don't, we've probably lost them" before they would graduate.
"If we don't teach them how to read, how can they read to learn?" Asbury said. "They get light-years behind those that can."
During those critical early years, he said, research shows that a classroom of 15 pupils is ideal. But school-system leaders typically feel that it can never be reached or afforded.
The Pulaski County teachers who studied the problem felt otherwise, Asbury said. The county will begin a five-year program next year by reducing early-grade classes to 20 pupils, and keep trimming until it reaches a 15-to-1 pupil-teacher ratio by the end of the decade.
The Critical Years/Critical Skills program generated excitement by those working on it, he said, because teachers had not been told before that they could reduce those class sizes, budget time differently or use other approaches they knew would work.
"We would be less than responsible if we did not take advantage of what we know in 1994, not what we knew in 1950 or what we knew in 1930," Asbury said.
Teachers once aimed for the average student, figuring the bright ones would do that much better and the slow ones could always find blue-collar jobs, he said. But many of those jobs no longer exist, and graduates must read to understand the technology they will be using.
Home life also will be important. It is too easy to believe that parents drop their children at school and delegate all learning to the teachers, Asbury said.
"Wrong. The parent is the primary educator in a child's life. Research supports that," he said. "We need a strong parent support component that doesn't let them off the hook."
He admitted that can be difficult in some home situations. "We can make up so much of that but we can't make up all of it. We just can't accept that parents aren't going to get involved."
Under the new program, students will be assessed at the start and end of each year to make sure they are on track, he said. "If they're not, we take it as a personal emergency. We employ emergency techniques" to catch them up, Asbury said.
The payoff for teachers in the upper grades to this early school emphasis should be a better student, he said. "It's important that we all be together. That's why we're here ... so that all of our schools are pointed in the same direction."
by CNB