Low income FL students in this
public elementary school are reading more...
...and more.
In fact, when every student in this school is reading during the school day,
the principal raises a white flag.
Passion for words buoys students, school
By Leslie Postal | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted June 9, 2002
SANFORD -- As her students hurry to class, Hamilton Elementary Principal Nan Parker clambers onto a picnic table to wave a white flag.
No sign of surrender, this banner bears the words "100% Readers." Parker breaks it out on the mornings she finds all her kids reading, killing time before class buried in paperbacks, magazines, even books downloaded onto personal digital assistants.
"Way to go!" Parker shouts. "Way to go!"
Later, she [the principal] hoists the flag up Hamilton's flagpole, a sign that, if nothing else, this school takes reading seriously.
And it has the test scores to prove it.
In 1998 and 1999, Hamilton's students were among the worst readers in the state. Three-quarters of its fourth-graders couldn't read at their grade level.
But last month, the Sanford school posted its best-ever scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, continuing a steady -- and remarkable -- climb that began four years ago.
When the state grades schools in the next two weeks, Parker hopes Hamilton will earn a B -- a far cry from the D ratings it received in 1999 and 2000. The school earned a C last year.
"When I came here, this was really a school in distress," Parker said. "It was pretty scary."
Reading scores climb
Hamilton has now posted three straight years of improvement in its FCAT fourth-grade reading score and this year beat the state average for the first time.
The portion of fourth-graders scoring at grade level hit 51 percent from a low of less than 25 percent four years ago. Their average score has climbed from 244 (out of 500) to 300.
Turning around a school isn't easy or quick.
Parker credits hard work and an intensive -- and controversial -- program called "Success for All," which requires the school to spend more time teaching reading in smaller classes.
The school assembled a committed staff run by a principal determined to see children from poverty succeed.
And Hamilton Elementary -- where 70 percent of the students are poor enough to qualify for free meals -- pushed reading, all the time.
Even the spare minutes after breakfast and before the official start of the day are spent reading. The national Reading Is Fundamental program provides students with their own books.
The school this year gave one fifth-grade class personal digital assistants, an experiment in blending hot technology into the curriculum.
If everyone reads, Parker stands in the main walkway or atop a picnic table, showing that flag.
"I've been seeing a great change since she's been at Hamilton," said Lucille Boothe, whose daughter Precious Boone, 11, enrolled last year.
"Her grades, she's keeping them at an A-B honor roll, and she never had that at the other school. The teachers out there, they support the kids more."
Discipline problems decline
The school used to be a place where rowdy kids ran around and the office overflowed with troublemakers.
"I truly believe a child would rather act up than have peers know they can't read," said teacher Buck Whigham, who has taught at Hamilton for a decade and weathered its "rough reputation."
But with improved academics, discipline problems eased.
"Our kids are walking around with books," Whigham said.
Parent Mary Lou Hinsley might be one of the biggest signs of change, as she's the sort who used to opt for private school or a change of address to avoid the public school on Eighth Street.
Hinsley's family relocated to Central Florida from Oklahoma for her husband's job. Before the move, the couple researched schools, settled on the Seminole County district, and then choose Hamilton for their youngest child because of its reading program.
"We took a lot of personal flak about why we were putting Zach into that school," Hinsley said.
But they liked that Hamilton promised long, intensive reading classes and a chance for students to move ahead at their own pace.
Two years later, the family has no regrets.
Zach, a precocious 9-year-old, has blossomed. What he describes as his "passion for reading" has been nurtured.
He's particularly enthralled with C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia books, which he first encountered at school, though he loves dirt-bike magazines, too.
"You could not buy the education he's gotten at Hamilton," Hinsley said.
Schools have struggled
For years, all of the public schools in Sanford -- the poorest section of a mostly well-off county -- have struggled.
Recently, these schools have received extra money to reduce class sizes, revamp facilities and offer new programs. They have all seen test-score improvements, though none as great as Hamilton's.
Hamilton, which opened in 1984, sits near downtown Sanford. The street across from campus runs down to Lake Monroe, tree-lined and dotted with gracious, older houses.
But for years, families living in those lovely homes rarely enrolled their children, instead managing to transfer to another public school, choosing private schools or home schooling.
Hamilton students came from other nearby streets, the ones lined with small, worn and dilapidated houses.
And for years, those poor children struggled to read, despite the teachers' best efforts.
"Our educational programs weren't strong," said Fran Whigham, Buck Whigham's wife, who has taught at the school since it opened. "Our kids needed something different, but no one knew what that something was."
Superintendent Paul Hagerty appointed Parker to Hamilton's top post in 1997.
"She is kind of a person with a mission," Hagerty said, "dedicated and focused almost exclusively on the children she serves."
Parker started by all but throwing out the standard, state-issued reading book. The text worked fine in other schools but didn't cut it with Hamilton's struggling readers.
Hamilton adopted Success for All, a school-reform and reading program developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University for inner-city Baltimore children.
In use in about 1,800 schools nationwide, the program includes explicit phonics lessons, youth-oriented literature, regular testing, and homework assignments requiring that every child read or be read to 20 minutes a night.
At school, Success for All devotes 90 minutes a day to uninterrupted reading and requires instruction in small groups organized by reading ability rather than by grade.
So as the school year ended, the kids reading Beverly Cleary's perennial favorite Ramona the Pest included two third-graders, a fourth-grader and a handful of fifth-graders.
The reading groups change several times a year as students are tested and moved around. With this setup, children needing extra help and children ready to move all get that chance.
"If you don't like reading or if you're not good at reading, it'll help you read," said Daniel Garcia, 11, who just finished fifth grade. "It's a motivating class."
Small reading classes help
No reading class has more than 20 students; some have just five or six kids. The average class size for the state is 23, and the average size in Seminole is 22.
Hamilton's reading groups are small because the school hires some part-time reading teachers and also requires special-education, gifted and computer-lab instructors to teach some of those classes.
It is the program's expense -- as much as $95,000 to implement it in the first year -- and its very scripted lesson plans that make Success for All controversial.
The program's mandatory lesson plans detail everything teachers do during the 90 minutes of reading time. When reading begins at Hamilton at 8:40 a.m., for example, all 37 teachers start reading aloud to their students. They're to stop 20 minutes later.
The first year, teacher Linda Crawford said she wished she could improvise more. Now, she doesn't.
"I have better readers now than I ever did before," she said, adding that students no longer need lengthy explanations of assignments because they can read the direction for themselves. "It used to be I would pass something out, and they would sit there and wait. Now I pass something out, and they go."
Like most teachers, Crawford also prefers working with a small reading group.
Success not assured
The program hasn't worked everywhere.
The Miami-Dade County school district put the program in about 35 schools, but all but eight dropped it after test scores failed to increase significantly. In Orange County, 13 schools once used the program, but, after uneven results, just four will keep it next year.
Hamilton teachers who didn't like the program left. Parker asked others to leave because she said they weren't good with poor students.
Those teachers who remain see the reading program's very structured and predictable lesson plans as just what their students need.
Besides, they had nothing to lose.
"There's no doubt our children can fail," Fran Whigham said. "We've proved that time and again."
The first round of testing after implementing Success For All in 1998 showed the depth of that failure.
Just 32 percent of Hamilton's students read at grade level, according to the program's tests. And 90 third-, fourth- and fifth-graders weren't reading at all.
Seminole County administrator Marjorie Murray said the program works at Hamilton because the staff has stuck with a plan for the long haul, instead of jumping into something new every school year.
Improvement still needed
Since 1999, the percentage of Hamilton fourth-graders scoring very poorly on FCAT reading -- level 1 on the five-level test -- has dropped from 61 percent to 31 percent this year.
The scores for the school's black students, who typically fared the worst, have improved, too. In 1998, 79 percent scored at level 1, compared to 47 percent last year. This year's scores broken down by race aren't yet available.
Still, Parker readily admits there is room for improvement.
"Does that mean our reading scores are equal to Sabal Point's?" she said, referring to Seminole's top-scoring elementary school in an affluent Longwood neighborhood. "No. But does it mean we're making dramatic improvements? Yes."
Alexia Cauthen, who just finished fifth grade, said Hamilton helped her become a good student and a strong reader, even when she struggled, and was held back, in third grade.
"If you read a book and see one of these hard words," the 12-year-old explained, "there's always a teacher to help you."
She's heading to middle school reading above her grade level and feeling confident. She'd recommend her school to anyone.
"I would tell them Hamilton is a great school," Alexia said.
Leslie Postal can be reached at lpostal@orlandosentinel.com or 407-772-8046.
