"Closing the achievement gap absolutely can be done, but it takes well-trained people with a vision, and extra resources. I just can't say that often enough."
—Carol Comeau, Superintendent of Anchorage School District
Anchorage, Alaska—Early on a frosty April morning, a five-minute drive north from downtown Anchorage takes one across the long expanse of the C Street Bridge, spanning the tracks of the Alaska Railroad and the fishing docks of the Cook Inlet. Straight ahead is Government Hill, named in the era of the great federal government Alaskan railroad construction project, from 1914 to 1923, when thousands of job seekers and adventurers poured into Anchorage. The workers and their families lived up on this hill, out of the muddy lowlands of Ship Creek, as Anchorage was then called. Today, the area still has a transient feel, with strip malls of launderettes, small stores, and quick-food restaurants, and blocks of low-rent apartment houses and trailer parks.
Just off the main road, right next door to Elmendorf Air Force Base, sits Government Hill School, one of 61 elementary schools in the Anchorage district. A sign in Spanish at the main entrance signals to a visitor that this is no ordinary school: "Déle a su hijo el regalo de dos lenguas," it says. "Give your child the gift of two languages." In the hallway on the way to Señora Zamora's first-grade room, a small boy who appears to be heading for the bathroom, hall pass swinging from his wrist, greets a man walking in the opposite direction. "Hey, Carlos! What's happening?" the man says, stopping to hug the child before going out the exit. "Is that your father?" a visitor asks Carlos. "Nah," he says, "that's my friend Leo's dad."
This affectionate encounter between a child and a parent would never have happened 10 years ago, according to anyone who remembers Government Hill school then, when parent involvement was nil, a series of principals had come and gone, teachers fled after a year or less, discipline problems were high, and test scores were rock-bottom low. The school had already closed once in the late 1970s for meager enrollment. As Alaska's boom-and-bust economy shifted from oil-based to service-based, immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador, and many other countries were drawn to Alaska seeking job opportunities in hotels, restaurants, and other tourism-oriented sectors. One of the city's pockets of low-rent housing where these families settled was Government Hill. By 1992— reduced to just 165 students—it was on the verge of shutting its doors again.
"All the neighborhood parents who could had left the school, and those students who remained were for the most part from poor homes in the largely transient population of the area," recalls Carol Comeau, director of elementary education in 1990-1993 and now superintendent of the Anchorage School District. "We were having serious discussions whether to close the school and put the students on a bus to some other school, or do something totally different and designate the school as an alternative program."
Fortunately for the neighborhood, and for the city, the second option won out.
Today, Government Hill is one of the great success stories of the Anchorage district, with nearly 500 students and an award-winning Spanish immersion program that has parents from all over Anchorage on the school's waiting list. In 1999, three years after the alternative program was launched, the school was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as one of several dozen "distinguished" Title I schools in the country, and the only one in Alaska. By 2000, the school's California Achievement Test scores in reading, writing, and math had made the biggest gains in the district over a five-year period, and Government Hill was honored as the Alaska Bilingual Program of the Year. In 2001, the school won nationwide recognition as one of only six schools in the country to be awarded the National School Change Award.
Back in Marissa Zamora's classroom, Carlos joins his classmates for the morning song of opposites. As Zamora points to the words in a big book, enunciating clearly in Spanish, the children sing and go through the motions of high and low, hot and cold, and in and out. Zamora—an animated woman with smiling brown eyes who came to Alaska from Oregon nine years ago because, she says, "I wanted to go somewhere where I can ski outside my door every day"—moves rapidly on to practice with numbers, using speech, writing, fingers to count, and coins to figure, all in Spanish. "How many are absent today? How many for hot lunch? What's the date? What combinations of dimes, nickels, and pennies can we use to make the date? Talk to your neighbor." Children huddle to discuss the numerical worth of a dime, some in English, some in Spanish, and some in "Spanglish," a creative mix of the two languages. "Español, por favor," Zamora, gently reminds those who slip exclusively into English.
Carlos and his classmates—about half are native Spanish speakers and half native English speakers—will spend the morning in Zamora's classroom, where everything from the travel posters to identifying stickers on the furniture, and all instruction, is in Spanish. After lunch, they will go into the classroom next door, where Zamora's teaching partner, Nancy Morris, conducts the afternoon lessons in English. For the native English-speaking students, who are selected through a lottery process, Government Hill offers an enrichment program they are eligible to enter only up until Christmas of first grade. For Spanish-speaking children, the school is a high-quality bilingual program, open at any level up to sixth grade. Those who arrive with limited English are given extra tutoring. The goal for all students in Alaska's only dual immersion program is academic achievement at or above grade level in both languages.
Meanwhile, Denise Rosales is stationed at a table in a corner of Carlos's classroom; pulling aside a few kids at a time, she helps them finish a seasonal art project—ceramic casts of their hands for Mother's Day spoon-holder gifts. Rosales, one of several professional staff who first came to the school as a volunteer, is a bilingual tutor, trained to help meet the needs of any child in the classroom, from behavioral problems to remedial English. Rosales's three children have gone through the immersion program. "The purpose of sending our kids here is so they won't lose their Spanish, so they can communicate with their grandparents in Guatemala," she says.
Helping Rosales is Gloria Teniente, who identifies herself as "Wyatt's grandmother." She has volunteered in her grandson's classroom five mornings a week since he began kindergarten. She says, "I was a working mother when my girls were growing up and I didn't participate, so now I want to pay back and help out the kids."
So how did a failing neighborhood school transform itself into a high-performing learning community—a school where grandparents volunteer five days a week and parents become professional staff? A school that attracts—and keeps—creative teachers? A school that is able to win multiyear, federal grants totaling more than a million dollars?
Like many successful transformations, this one began with a simple idea. Back in 1992, Janice Gullikson, world languages coordinator for the district, had just returned from visiting immersion programs around the country—and been particularly impressed with a dual-language school in San Jose, California. Then she found herself in a meeting discussing the fate of Government Hill. "The school already had a large number of students who spoke Spanish," Gullikson recalls, "so I suggested we start a dual-language program, where native Spanish-speaking students would be actively recruited and seen as an asset."
Gullikson's idea met with enthusiastic support from the principal at the time, as well as the district and several PTA parents who were ready to fight to keep their children in their neighborhood school. "We decided to go for a three-year, Title VII bilingual grant because we knew the funds were out there," Gullikson continues, "and we built in a planning year to allow us time to get ready."
After a year of preparation, Government Hill launched its dual-language experiment with 50 students—25 native Spanish speakers and 25 English speakers—in two combined kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. Recruitment of students was a challenge in the beginning, Gullikson recalls, because of the school's reputation and its location. She gives a nod of gratitude to those "risk-taking parents" who, despite misgivings, enrolled their children and became solid backers of the program. Many of those first students are now in the Spanish immersion program at Romig Middle School, and the district has plans in the works to create a high school immersion program, as well.
Still, it was a rocky beginning, remembers Kim Amaya, who started as a parent volunteer when her daughter was in the first class. Now a kindergarten teacher, Amaya says: "We were all still figuring out how dual immersion works, and we probably should have started out with just kindergarten. There was a lot of concern, especially among Spanish-speaking parents who were not convinced it was a good idea for their children to be learning in Spanish, and some left." The next year, kindergarten and first grade were taught separately.
The larger problem, however, was the divide between the immersion students—who constituted less than 25 percent of the school population but were benefiting from all sorts of new resources, plus highly motivated parents—and the neighborhood children, who came to school with the same old problems: poverty, transience, and unstable families. "The principal, Shirley Abrams, worked hard to build bridges between the Government Hill community and the immersion parents," says Superintendent Comeau, remembering the struggle of the first two or three years. "She also did a fine job reaching out to create school-business partnerships." Volunteer reading tutors were recruited from AlasCom, a neighborhood business, and from Alaska Railroad, which also sponsored an annual back-to-school barbeque. "As word got out," Comeau says, "more and more Government Hill families began to come back to their neighborhood school."
As the end of the three-year grant cycle approached, a group of energized teachers, parents, district personnel, and community members came together to develop a new vision for Government Hill that would encompass both the immersion program and the neighborhood school population, which had grown to include Korean, Russian, Albanian, and Alaska Native students. By then the school had attracted a new principal, Sandy Stephens, previously supervisor of elementary special education. "In Sandy, we discovered we had hired a tireless worker who was able to galvanize the school," says Leonard Cestaro, a sixth-grade teacher who has seen Government Hill through all its changes.
Stephens, who had also been a Title I migrant supervisor, knew the school well, and she quickly took the lead in working with the committee. With their eyes on the prize—a second Title VII bilingual grant, plus a Title I grant for schoolwide restructuring—the committee met 30 times in the course of the year. "We did a mission statement, and goals and objectives for the school, so we would know where we've been, where we're going, and if we are achieving anything," Stephens says. She notes with pride that the planning process alone sparked change, and by the spring of the following year students' standardized test scores had already begun to rise.
The hard work of the committee, with the help of an excellent grantwriter, paid off in 1996 when Government Hill won a five-year, $1.2 million grant to realize its vision of rebuilding a school where all children would achieve academic excellence. Five key strategies for change and academic revitalization were to:
With the new grant in place, Stephens turned her attention to the critical needs of the school: restructuring the classroom culture, developing creative and challenging curriculum that would meet district standards, recruiting staff, and providing ongoing professional development.
The creation of the international tutor position for each teaching team was central to the school's turnaround, according to Stephens, because it eliminated the practice of pulling students out of the classroom for special services. "Students need to be in the classroom and getting all the information that other children get, without missing out on anything," Stephens says emphatically. "If a child needs lower-level reading material, or a higher-level math lesson, we differentiate what we do within the classroom by modifying the regular curriculum." To pay for the new tutors (most speak Spanish, but one speaks Korean and another Tagalog), Stephens pooled state and federal money that would normally be used to hire separate specialists.
Curriculum development was another critical need. "In the beginning, we put in everything the district expected us to teach," says Stephens, "and then we decided what's important, and what's meeting standards. We don't have time, especially in the immersion program with two language arts blocks, to do that lesson on chocolate, for example, if it doesn't apply to anything else. Rather, we focus on making sure that what we teach is relevant, and hooking the kids in." Teaching teams meet regularly to craft and refine an immersion curriculum that is infused with the cultures of Spanish-speaking countries, and teachers in the neighborhood program develop curriculum that reflects the ethnic background of the student population.
"We've been doing a curriculum project for six years now," says Stephens, "and what's fun about it is that it's never going to be done. It's the process that's important."
Today, Government Hill has almost 500 students: 325 in the dual- language program and 175 in the neighborhood school, and standardized test scores are in the top 10 schools in the district. Bridging the divide between the two programs remains a challenge, however, and will continue as long as high mobility and poverty affect low-income areas such as Government Hill. The district has begun to address the problem by initiating a district-community task force to explore what can be done to support families staying in place, at least through a school year. Looping two grades with the same teacher has also been effective, the district has found, because children are more engaged with school, and they pressure their parents not to move.
"There's no question the achievement gap has been narrowed at Government Hill," says Comeau, "and I think Sandy has done an incredibly good job of pooling and transforming all the state and federal programs into a coordinated, integrated model." Comeau continues cautiously, "This model can be duplicated, but it takes extra resources, and a staff committed to a vision and willing to stay put for awhile and really go through the struggle and challenges."
But beyond achievement and test scores, Government Hill has become a vital educational hub that invites visiting, participation, and commitment. It's a place where Leo's father stoops to hug Carlos in the hall, where Wyatt's grandmother volunteers five mornings a week, and where one sixth-grade teacher in the neighborhood school goes swimming on Saturdays with her students.
"I love the feel of this school," Stephens says. "In my old job I went around to the 61 elementary schools, and I know all schools do not feel the same. It was really important to me that this school feels good to everyone: parents, teachers, kids, and people from the community." 
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