Recognizing the Giftedness of All

By Rhonda Barton
Photos by Brad Talbutt

In this tiny Hispanic community in southwest Idaho, a fiery public advocate and a committed school staff are working together for the betterment of children and their families.

Wilder, Idaho—Turning off the highway, your first introduction to Wilder—population 1,500—is Chula Vista or “el campo,” an unbroken line of identical two-family, no-frills public housing units ranged along winding roads. Almost half the residents of this rural town, about an hour west of Boise, call Chula Vista home. The town itself—a Mexican restaurant, the Polar Bear snack shop, a double-wide that serves as the public library, and other unprepossessing storefronts—beckons in the distance, separated physically and emotionally from the campo by a dry gulch and a high chain link fence.

The Simplot food processing plant claims one edge of town while at the other sits Holmes Elementary, butting up against dusty brown fields that soon will sprout onions, sugar beets, and hops. With its 251 students, Holmes faces more than its share of challenges. Many of the children are not literate in English or Spanish; almost 100 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch; and there is high student turnover as families look for agricultural work. The 50-year-old school building has no central hallways, with each classroom opening to the outside and isolating the staff from each other. In the office, the giant jar of peanut butter labeled “mouse bait” attests to just one of the problems of a physical plant that’s old and inadequate. Another barrier extends beyond the school walls: Although the town is largely Hispanic, school and town leaders are not and almost all the teachers commute from other towns.

Still, there are glimmers of hope. A new leadership team, a core of committed teachers, and a fiery public advocate are determined to break through the barriers just as Wilder’s crops struggle to push through the hard-packed dirt.

One passionate Mexican

“¡Si, se puede!” (or “Yes, we can!”) reads the sign over the portable classroom that straddles one end of Holmes Elementary’s playing field. It was the rallying cry of Cesar Chavez’s farm workers’ movement and it’s now the motto of an education experiment that holds promise for Wilder and other communities like it. Sylvia Rel Blain, a self-described “passionate Mexican,” is the driving force behind the Family Learning Center, a combination preschool and adult education program that opened its doors in the portable last November.

On one side of the two-room center, three- to five-year-olds practice their colors and letters while their parents tackle basic English and computer skills on the other side of the wall. At the end of the two-hour session, the preschoolers join their moms to share simple English storybooks. Today, it’s a tale about cats called Mac and Tab and each mother leaves the portable with her own photocopy of the story to read at home.

Blain gives three-year-old Manuelito a goodbye hug and then offers his mother encouraging words in both Spanish and English. “You need to be here as an example,” Blain reminds the mother of five who is pregnant with twins. The 60-year-old Blain is at once a concerned friend, a role model, a community activist, and a tireless teacher. No one escapes her grasp: Later, as she finishes a lunch of taco salad at Los Jarritos restaurant, Blain reminds the waitress to show up for GED classes on Friday night and Saturday morning at the Family Learning Center’s satellite classroom at Chula Vista. It’s hard to say no to Blain, whose stylish black linen dress and stiletto heels hint at her former life as a hard-charging corporate executive.

Setting priorities

Taking a lesson from business, Blain did some “market research” before launching the Family Learning Center with Wilder Superintendent Dan Arriola’s backing and a mixture of public and private funds. She sent home a survey with Holmes Elementary’s students, asking their parents to identify high-priority needs in the community. Each child was promised a new book when he or she brought back the completed survey. It only took two days—and 300 books—to get 100 percent participation.

From the survey, Blain set an agenda. Her nonprofit, ¡Si, se puede!, helped reopen Wilder’s food bank and stock a clothing center while the Family Learning Center offered preschool and adult education classes for the Hispanic community as well as Spanish lessons for the town’s Anglo business owners and residents. To further empower the Hispanic community, Blain has organized monthly evening meetings on the rights and responsibilities of parents.

“I tell them they need to ask [teachers] ‘What are you teaching? How are you helping my child?’” Blain says. “In the past, parents’ questions have always focused on behavior: ‘How has my Juanita been acting?’ not ‘How much is she learning?’ That’s why No Child Left Behind has been such a wake-up call for Mexicans and others. We didn’t know the questions, much less the answers.”

Blain’s mission in Wilder is motivated by both a religious calling and a personal debt. Peppering her speech alternately with “Praise God” and Spanish cuss words, she confides that she was “a poor Chicana” who grew up in a dirt-floor chicken coop, the daughter of onion pickers in New Mexico. Her first brush with the U.S. education system opened up a world of possibilities and she still thanks her first teacher, Mrs. Bryant, for “making me what I am today.”

Mrs. Bryant offered the young Sylvia a trade: If Blain would teach her Spanish, she would help Blain learn English. Besides a new language, Blain learned that her heritage could be a welcome part of her education. She hopes to pass that lesson on to the students in Wilder, hooking their parents in along the way.

“If we recognize the giftedness of our Hispanic families, they’ll buy into the system,” she believes. “These parents are no different from the non-Hispanics. Everyone wants to learn and to be part of the American dream.” To help accomplish that, Blain says we need to make sure teachers represent the makeup of the community: “We need role models or people who have a heart for the poor.”

Poverty’s effects ignore ethnicity and race. Blain tells the story of a teacher giving a white five-year-old a marker. The puzzled girl had never seen one, and didn’t know how to use it.

While it’s too early to measure the long-term impact of the Family Learning Center program, it’s already grabbed the public’s attention and imagination. Three other school districts have scheduled visits and a front-page feature splashed across a recent Sunday edition of The Idaho Statesman, the state’s largest newspaper. In addition to $15,000 in Title I money from the school district, the Family Learning Center garnered grants from the Whittenberger Foundation and the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation.

Superintendent Arriola considers the program a good investment and, in a sense, providential. Knowing there was a “disconnect” between the school and the community, he was searching for a way to bridge the divide when he caught Blain on a public service program on local television. “I happened to see this lady who was very committed, very enthusiastic, just a ball of fire,” he remembers. The two got together and in less than six months, the Family Learning Center became a reality. “When I see 17 adults in classes working diligently, learning English, and having a great time, that’s paying off for us,” says Arriola. “Our parents will understand more about their child’s education, and the kids are excited by their parents’ learning too. Another piece is the preschool, which is getting kids kindergarten-ready. We’re just in the baby stages of this program but it keeps growing and growing.“

“You can be a victim or victorious,” Blain states. “I choose victorious.” If she has her way, that victory will ripple beyond the portable, all the way to Chula Vista.

Working together

A stone’s throw from the Family Learning Center, another portable serves as Holmes’s teachers’ lounge and conference room. There, members of one of the school’s three professional learning teams (PLTs) are deep in a discussion of leveled reading, preparing to make a recommendation at that afternoon’s faculty meeting.

PLTs are new to the school and teams are still marking their territory. But, they’ve given the staff a sharpened focus, according to Jayne Sowers, who coaches the PLTs as part of the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory’s partner-site agreement with Holmes. PLTs are small, highly collaborative teacher teams that meet regularly to look at improving student learning. They use four key strategies: studying school and classroom data; sharing and reflecting on classroom practices; applying research and best practices; and improving teamwork and collaboration skills.

Sowers believes that PLTs have made a huge difference in the level of conversation at Holmes. “Teachers talk to each other now about what and how they’re teaching,” she observes. “They’ve stopped placing blame on others. Effectively, they’re taking responsibility for improving test scores and talking about instruction instead of complaining about student behavior.”

Clearly an attitudinal shift was called for: While Holmes succeeded in making adequate yearly progress last year and had high proficiency scores on the Idaho State Achievement Tests (or ISATs), it came at a price: Almost one-third of the student body had been retained. This year, fewer students will be held back, and the chances of making AYP at the elementary school are seen as slim.

Sowers has worked with Holmes staff to study “90-90-90 schools”: schools with 90 percent minority enrollment, 90 percent free and reduced-price lunch eligibility, and 90 percent of students reaching achievement goals. Sowers asked Holmes teachers what strategies they could emulate that were used by those successful schools. PLTs were one answer. Now, each of Holmes’s dozen faculty members has signed on to teams studying reading, language, and character education.

On this unseasonably hot spring day, the reading PLT goes back and forth with co-Principal Joe Youren over cut off levels for retention and progress forms that students will take home to their parents. It doesn’t all go smoothly, as the teachers and Youren wrangle over their respective responsibilities. In the end, though, the PLT comes away with a clear direction and an acknowledgment that their recommendations on certain issues carry weight. Later that afternoon, the PLT members inform the rest of the staff that the school will continue with leveled reading and present their research on why that decision makes sense. They also offer an introduction to Developmental Reading Assessment, a new testing model that Holmes will start using four times a year to track students’ progress. The reading PLT will be in charge of getting the rest of the faculty up to speed on how to administer the assessment tool.

Despite some turf wars and frustrations, the four teachers who make up the reading PLT think the team has had an impact. “We’ve benefited from having built relationships of trust,” says Helen Marie Maguire, a fourth-grade teacher. “We value each other as professionals.” Marilyn Dacolias, who teaches third grade, agrees: “We rely on each other’s strengths. Having Leslie here (the kindergarten teacher) has opened up my understanding.” Leslie appreciates the “nice variety of strengths in the PLT” and special education teacher Liz Nelson says the PLT has made her feel less isolated, giving her a window into what’s going on outside her area.

A focus on instruction

Co-Principal Joe Youren recognizes that PLTs are “an outstanding way of promoting communication, improving collegiality, and making incremental progress in a building.” But, he says, Holmes needs more than incremental change: It needs a sea change in its approach to teaching. He and Co-Principal Sandy Maras are counting on ongoing professional development to help bring up test scores at Holmes. They think it’s already made a difference at Wilder Middle-High School.

Once a week, Holmes teachers stay after school to attend classes on instructional practices to improve reading comprehension—what Youren labels “the core of all instruction.” At the secondary school, teachers spend three lunch periods each week studying SIOP—sheltered instruction observation protocol—to meet the varied needs of a student population that’s made up of 60 to 70 percent English language learners. The teachers receive credit for the courses, designed with the help of Northwest Nazarene University, and the district covers the costs. Outside the sessions, Youren and Leona Manke, a retired professor from Albertson College, provide more individualized teacher coaching and mentoring centered on literacy.

Both Youren and Maras, who’ve shared the role of principal for only a year, are acutely aware that others have tried to transform Holmes and fallen short. In fact, Holmes has seen four different principals in the last eight years. That high rate of turnover is one reason that Arriola pushed to split the leadership role. Youren, whose office is in the secondary building, is in charge of K-12 curriculum and instruction while Maras handles management and operations from her desk at the elementary school. “I believe one reason why we’re failing in education is because principals aren’t instructional leaders—they’re tied up with maintenance,” says Arriola. “This arrangement enables me to use Joe’s background as a master teacher and give him time each day to be in the classroom, focusing on methodology.”

“The teachers at Holmes are learning as much as the students,” says Priscilla Pounds, Idaho’s recently retired Title I coordinator. “The school is making great progress: Once they accomplish one thing, they take on another.”

Arriola agrees there’s been progress but admits that change doesn’t come easy. There’s discomfort in overhauling entrenched habits. “When I first arrived, the staff was very distrustful of each other and fragmented. Everyone was in their own classroom, doing their own thing,” he says. “Three years later, we still have to tear down that ‘Lone Rangering’ so we’re all doing the same thing, at different times and at different levels, so our kids can learn more.”

The way Arriola sees it, Holmes Elementary doesn’t have a choice in the matter. He bluntly observes, “For us in Wilder, it’s come down to we’re here to save children’s lives. We’ve got to continue to find ways to do that.”

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