PORTLAND, Oregon—
As Principal Paula McCullough strides through her school, little footsteps pursue her down a quiet hallway. "Our teacher said if you have time for it, we can read you a story," a small voice says.

"Well, come, let's sit down here right now," says McCullough as she nods toward a bench. Charaknigh, a tiny Cambodian-American first-grader, sits beside her and reads from the story he has carefully penciled on blue-lined newsprint. His tale, "The Alien UFO," is about a boy who wants to buy a flying saucer, but his aunt tells him it costs too much.

Students at Daniel A. Grout School in Southeast Portland have lots of stories to tell -- stories from the worn apartments and cramped, postwar houses of their working-class neighborhood. Often less fanciful than Charaknigh's, these stories have titles like "How I Came from Russia to Portland." They tell about beloved people (a Blackfeet Indian grandfather, an absent father) and events both memorable and painful (a visit to Romania, parents fighting and divorcing, moving too many times).

The staff, too, has a story to tell. And tell it they do -- with zest. It's the story of how they built a unified literacy program that sparked change across the school. Of countless meetings sweetened with chocolate and fueled with caffeine. Of anxious discussions voicing fears that always come with profound change. Of their pride and pleasure in work well done. And while the story will have no ending as long as there are children to teach, students' personal stories are sure to turn out better for the efforts being made at Grout.

Five years ago when the story begins, Grout's classroom teachers shared a deepening dissatisfaction with the school's low reading scores. Yet they were upset by the remedy then in place for those low scores: pullout sessions for kids in Title I, special ed, and ESL programs. With 20 percent of Grout's 400 students in ESL and 60 percent on free and reduced-price lunch, the pullouts created constant disruptions in the classroom.

"We had a revolving door," says fifth-grade teacher Carolyn Neal. "You rarely had your whole class for any longer than 30 minutes a day with all the ins and outs and pullouts."

The pullouts didn't work well for the special-programs staff either. "I felt I was really being a bother and I should apologize every time I came to the door to get kids," says ESL teacher Cynthia Bauer. And by the time she spent five minutes gathering kids from different classrooms and five minutes sending them back, there wasn't much left of the half-hour allotted for language instruction.

The Grout staff tried loading certain classrooms with ESL or special ed students and then teaming classroom teachers with special-programs staff. They tried common pullout times for each grade level. Neither option worked well.

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