Setting a good example at The New School

Setting a good example at The New School

By Sanjay Bhatt
Seattle Times staff reporter

When Principal Gary Tubbs opened The New School in South Seattle three years ago, he expressed his wish for a successful school by coloring in one eye of a daruma doll, a Japanese good-luck charm.

Tubbs has since colored in the doll's other eye to celebrate a dream realized: a school where students take charge of their own learning; where teachers talk openly and frequently about what's working and what's not; and where more than 88 percent of second-graders, most of them poor and minority, were reading at grade level this spring, up from 44 percent last fall.

"Every school in Seattle could be as successful as The New School given the level of financial support we receive and the willingness to really explore what it means to educate the whole child — body, mind and spirit," said Tubbs, who retired last week. "This is not rocket science. This is doable."

Lessons learned at The New School may be useful to Seattle Public Schools as it seeks to turn around low-performing schools and get off a state watch list mandated by federal law.

Over the next year, Chief Academic Officer Steve Wilson and Deputy State Superintendent Mary Alice Heuschel will scrutinize the curricula, instruction and training in low-performing schools and coach teachers and other staff on ways they can help their students improve.

The New School, designed to be a small, pre-K-8 school, boasts class sizes of 17 students, a longer school year, home visits by school staff and a full-day pre-kindergarten program. Accommodating preschool through second grade until this fall, when it adds third grade, the school has a wait list. Its $5.6 million budget — based on 2003-04 figures, the most recent available — is funded largely through a grant from The New School Foundation.

The New School


Location: old South Shore Middle School building (constructed 1973), 8825 Rainier Ave. S.; opened as The New School in 2002

Enrollment: 151 in 2004-05 school year, kindergarten through second grade; 204 planned for 2005-06, kindergarten through third grade

Demographics: 46.4 percent African American; 29.1 percent Asian; 14.6 percent white; 9.3 percent Latino; 0.7 percent Native American (2004-05 data)

Eligible for free and reduced-price lunch: 43 percent (2004-05)

Other facts: The New School's school year runs 20 days longer than the standard Seattle Public Schools year

Source: Seattle Public Schools

While The New School is a wonderful program, Wilson said, it spends more per pupil than other district schools — and that's hard to reproduce districtwide. "In order to do that, we'd have to change an awful lot of priorities," he said.

Some things, however, don't cost a lot of money: Systems already at work in The New School are mentioned in Wilson's academic plan for next year. That plan calls on all schools to "monitor student progress frequently and adjust instruction." It also requires school staff to form teams that target student learning needs and verify that those have been met.

School Board member Irene Stewart said staff and parents at The New School have created a strong learning community. "If all that money went away, I still think it would be a very good school," she said.

Indications of success

The New School offers early indications of success: A healthy relationship with families. Zero turnover of teachers, all of whom Tubbs hired. And high achievement by all students, whose progress is tracked almost weekly.

"You have to have a tight school-assessment system," said Tubbs, who served as the district's director of assessment under the late Superintendent John Stanford.

Teachers are expected to continuously evaluate students' growth through class work, Tubbs said, and each teacher assesses his or her students in December and March before second-graders take the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) in April. All the test results are used for improvement.

DRA results suggest that poor second-grade students at The New School made bigger gains in reading proficiency than their peers districtwide. At The New School, 87 percent passed in the spring, up from 36 percent in the fall. Districtwide, 73 percent of second-graders eligible for free or reduced-price lunch passed the DRA, up from 47 percent in the fall.

"I don't think we can do it without private money," Tubbs says, "unless the state and our country support public education to the same degree that this school is now endowed."

The real test will be next year when the school enrolls its first class of third-graders, who will take the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL).

"Fear-based and ego-driven school-assessment systems don't work," Tubbs said. "People don't trust one another, and they feel it's a gotcha system. When it's love-based and child-focused and adults get their egos out of the way, a school-assessment system is very, very powerful."

An eight-member "wellness team," which includes Tubbs, the school nurse, a counselor and a secretary, has a member assigned to specific teachers. Each member checks in with teachers weekly to find out which students aren't learning and in what academic areas.

"One teacher can't do it for every child. [So] what can we as a community do for every child?" Tubbs said.

This year, that assessment system has led Tubbs to reassign two students to different teachers. When the school needed a Somali translator and the district couldn't supply him with one, Tubbs hired a Somali mother as a tutor. She happened to have four children enrolled in the school — or half its Somali-speaking population.

Sara Odhiambo, the teachers union representative at The New School, said the wellness team is one of the school's best assets. "No other school that I know of [in the district] has that," she said. It takes time and commitment. "There's an openness here and a willingness to learn and listen from each other," she said.

Uncertain future

Despite the school's success, controversy has left its future under a cloud: In 2002, the district's administration announced that The New School would take over a renovated South Shore building by 2004, without deciding on where to put its other tenant, South Lake High School.

A new School Board majority took office in December 2003 and put the project on hold. The New School continues to share space with South Lake High and will run out of space after next year.

The administration plans to turn the South Shore building into a neighborhood middle school because hundreds of middle-school students living in the area now take buses to schools in the city's north end. Chief Operating Officer Mark Green said that by the end of August he would recommend where to put The New School.

Victoria Stuth, former president of The New School's parents group, said parents have petitioned the district to keep the program configured as a K-8 and in its neighborhood. "It would break our hearts to lose our school," Stuth said.

As Tubbs caps nearly 32 years in public education, he says he believes the School Board will eventually see The New School as a model for the district.

Right now, "the whole system, including the School Board, is so wrapped up in drama and criticism that it's stuck, and until people start embracing each other and supporting each other's ideas, we will not truly move forward as a district. And frankly [that means] even censoring some people who speak at School Board meetings who do not contribute solutions. They are creating animosity and they need to be quiet."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com

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