THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050234
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
If I said the recent dedication of the new wing of B.M. Williams Primary School was a classy program, you would figure I was making another of the rotten puns I am addicted to.
Truth, not pun. It was indeed a classy program with a nod to yesterday, today and tomorrow. The yesterday was 1957, when the school, named for a school board chairman, opened its door. The new wing added 30,000 square feet, including a computer room, an art lab and a new library. Inflationary note: the original school cost $575,000. The addition cost $3.3 million.
Dr. Patricia Powers, principal of the school, took us on a quick verbal ride back to 1957. ``Wonderful year, wonderful era as far as public school education was concerned,'' she said. The big news that year was Sputnik, the Soviet satellite, and Elvis. Sputnik sparked a new emphasis on education. Elvis, Powers said, had kids dancing and parents protesting.
In the 1957 classrooms at B.M. Williams, the basics were the much-revered Three Rs. They're still basic, but now it's Three Rs and one CT for computer technology. Teaching methods have changed, too, Powers said, and the proof was an absolute hoot of a performance by kids in the first grade classes taught by Becky Jacobs and Betty Smith.
Out came the kids in two groups. One group was yesterday, boys in white shirts and red bow ties, girls in best bib and tucker. They sang ``The Alphabet Song'' most of us remember. Very nice but very formal. Then the kids in the other group, who had their backs to the audience, turned around. They were today. Very much today.
They were a rainbow of colors in sweats and T-shirts and bright britches. They were an art gallery of lively sweater designs. And they were outstandingly cool in sunglasses that wrapped around each young face.
Up stepped a sturdy little guy in a sweatshirt that sported a gaudy 4x4 monster truck legend. He was the boss singer, leading his side like a Marine drill instructor calling out the chant to a snappy platoon on parade. This was ``The Alphabet Song'' with an attitude. The sights and sounds these kids were growing up with had become an educational tool.
Next came a talk by Evelyn Reel, retired after a 41-year career as teacher, supervisor and administrator in Norfolk County and Chesapeake schools. She had a little history lesson to give.
She told how Thomas Jefferson (you feel like saying, ``Of course!'') introduced a bill to establish a public school system in Virginia in 1779. It failed, but he tried again in 1796. This time it passed.
After the history came Reel's admonition for the assembled parents: ``Teach your children to love this school and to do what they are here to do - to learn.''
Then School Board Member Tom Bray recalled being a student at B.M. Williams back in the early 1960s. Battlefield Boulevard was called Great Bridge Road in those days, he said, and you could only wear shorts to school on field days.
He had another memory, too. It was of how a big kid at a bus stop used to stomp his lunch every morning. Bray said he had thought about accusing School Board Chairman Maury Brickhouse of being the stomper, but Brickhouse told him that wouldn't have been accurate. ``I wouldn't have stomped your lunch,'' said the mildly chunky Brickhouse. ``I would have eaten it.''
The ``today'' look at the school came from two first-graders, Sara Ruthven and William Johnson III. William is the grandson of a former Chesapeake assistant superintendent. The poem they read together had lines that went like this:
We have a lab with computers, all brand new.
And a huge new library with CD-ROM, too.
We read more than just textbooks; we use literature, too.
We do monthly projects and learn something new.
In math we have fun; we still add and subtract,
But we've learned that it's more than remembering facts.
We get to use calculators, cereal and beans.
We've learned to figure things out and work as a team.
We still learn to read, but not Dick or Jane.
The stories we read have multicultural names.
And that multicultural bit was a big change for everyone to see. The 1995 B.M. Williams crop of kids was white and African-American and Asian. I remarked on the happy mix to School Board Clerk Ed Hughes, sitting next to me.
He smiled and nodded. ``The great hope of America is right up there in front of your eyes.'' by CNB