Ventura Elementary continues to do battle with two foes that are unlikely to change anytime soon — a relatively high percentages of poor families and English language learners — both of which affect its chances at performing well on standardized tests such as the FCAT.
Few kids who start kindergarten at the school finish up fifth grade there. Ventura Elementary is a microcosm of Orange County Public Schools — its struggles are OCPS struggles, magnified to be seen more clearly.
The 11th-largest school district in the country has a higher mobility rate than most counties in the state, with an average of 52 percent for elementary schools, according to Superintendent Ron Blocker. Ventura’s astounding 85 percent mobility rate is not surprising for an elementary school that draws heavily from surrounding apartment complexes.
It’s a world where many parents live paycheck to paycheck, struggle to pay the rent and utilities, and have to move fairly often. “Some of our parents work three jobs,” explains the new principal, Lisa Suggs.
“Many single parents are pulling double duty, trying to be Mom and Dad.” The federal government defines a Title I school as 50 percent of the student body living at the poverty line, qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches. OCPS defines Title I as 75 percent of the student body.
Ventura Elementary has 81 percent, which means 4 out of every 5 students are poor. For some of those kids, lunch is the only nutritious meal of their day.
In Azalea Park, where a person’s more likely to speak Spanish than English, three-quarters of the Ventura student body is Hispanic, and some of them come to school with little to no English. It’s natural for parents’ financial worries to seep into their children’s consciousness, for these children to grow up with adult-sized worries resting on their shoulders.
“Sometimes kids here are older than their years, because they have to cook dinner or help watch their siblings, because their parents have to work,” says Assistant Principal Mike Martucci. “All these factors say kids can’t do well. And yet this school last year became an A school as defined by the state of Florida.”
The well-documented correlation between poverty and diminished school performance belies a school like Ventura Elementary, with its feeling of hope, its climate of great expectations. And its grade from Tallahassee. “One of the anomalies here is that typically, Title I schools have low parental involvement. But we have amazing parent participation,” Suggs says.
Even last week’s tornado warnings and torrents of rain didn’t prevent a packed cafeteria, chock full of parents meeting to help improve their kids’ math scores. And 50 to 85 parents show up every week for Bump-Up Saturday, a program to impart test-taking skills.
Using part of a $2,000 donation from Lowe’s, the school has built four picnic tables near the cafeteria, where parents can eat with their kids without the lunchtime din interrupting rare quality time. “It flies in the face of conventional wisdom that a school with this mobility rate, with this socioeconomic status, received an A rating from the state of Florida,” Martucci says.
Reaping what they sow
Ventura administrators and teachers
stretch every dollar as far as it can go,
using grants from the city of Orlando and
Lowe’s to create a butterfly garden and a
vegetable patch for science education last
autumn.
Statewide, science education is following
a national trend toward hands-on
learning and experimentation, beginning
in kindergarten.
Ventura Elementary jumped from a B to an Alast year, the first year science questions counted toward FCAT scores and school grades. FCAT testing from March 11-24 will bring students inside for the high-stakes standardized exam that decides school grades and, ultimately, funds. The correlation between poverty and low test scores is undeniable, but Ventura Elementary is determined to keep beating the odds.
“Last year, our parent-involvement program was voted Program of the Year by the national PTA,” Suggs says. “We’ve proved that it can be done, that parents can be involved in Title I schools.” In their vegetable patch are large heads of cabbage and lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower, spinach, tomatoes, carrots, onions and marigolds (to keep the pests away).
Science-lab instructor Kim Hartley takes at least one group a week out to the garden. She talks with the younger kids about seeds and roots, stems and leaves. The older ones learn about different types of soil, and the animals that are attracted to the garden. She teaches every student in the school as part of the specials rotation with PE, music and art, once every eight days.
When she brought a second-grade class out early on, tiny green shoots were appearing in the dirt. “They said, ‘Oh, it’s growing! It’s ready!’ They wanted to immediately pick it when they saw it was growing,” Hartley says, laughing. “That provided a really good teaching moment, when I explained that it takes a while for things to germinate and begin growing, that vegetables don’t all grow at the same rate.”
Before the broccoli plant flowered, tiny peapods appeared all over the plant, which the students picked and brought back to the classroom. “They split the pods open, took the seeds out and compared them to other seeds to see how a particular seed makes a particular food, there’s not just one general seed for everything,” she says.
“They got very excited over the pods, and they each took one home.” With her after-school Science Club, open to fourth- and fifth-graders, they will plant strawberries, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers, basil and mint. “It’s a real blessing to have this at school, because so many of these children would never have this opportunity, to experience a garden,” Hartley says. “I love seeing the light click on. It’s the best experience.”
Ventura Elementary had a working greenhouse before the 2004 hurricanes wiped it out. Ultimately, Suggs and Martucci hope to expand the gardens to a bigger greenhouse with a cement floor, where snakes can’t invade, where they can start to grow vegetables and herbs — or flowers for Mother’s Day — and, when they are mature, transplant them outside. “If science is a play, our kids need to be onstage performing, not in the audience watching,” Martucci says.
“The only way to do well in science is to experiment, with trial and error, to take what you’ve learned and apply it, to have a hypothesis and test it.” Students will experience firsthand how living things interact with the environment, how photosynthesis works, how composting makes more out of limited natural resources.
Things they can read in a book — or things they can learn on their hands and knees in the dirt. “The herb and vegetable garden is their outdoor classroom, where they can apply their learning. Kids need to see real-world connections,” Martucci says. “The economy is diversifying. In the future, our kids will be fighting for jobs all over the world.
These problems are being solved overseas while we’re sleeping. “According to a Myers-Briggs test, 100 percent of males and 80 percent of females learn better kinesthetically in middle school. Doesn’t it make sense they would have to be participating?”
