PIE was founded on the principle of new and alternative education. One of the first tasks was to present a model for an alternative school within a school.
Here is the text of a presentation that we made in April, 1994.
PRESENTATION
My name is Jamie Whitehurst. I have one child at the Upper Nyack Elementary school , and one who will be there soon. I've been asked to make a brief presentation this evening.
First of a11, I'd like to thank the PTA, President Frank Scotto, and Principal Ostrowsky. It's important that parents, teachers and other community members get together to discuss the education o-f our children. And I thank you all for coming out.
Since this Fall, a bunch of people have been trying to educate themselves about education: looking into the literature, making school visits, speaking with professional educators and others about what seems to be working in various schools. What began with people chatting on street corners and in 1iving rooms has grown into a diverse group of community members who've shared books and video tapes and invited in various speakers. This evening is an extension of that process: sharing some of the things they've discovered with you in the hope that you'11 be interested and that you'11 have ideas and
resources of your own to add into the mix. At the heart of this whole effort has been parents who love their kids and care about their future. And that, by definition, inc1udes a11 of us.I want to emphasize how diverse this group has been so far. It's included parents from all three elementary schools, the Midd1e and High Schools, people of color, parents of children who have been labeled gifted, handicapped, and that often over-looked group: average. At monthly, open meetings, there have been school board members, teachers, officers of the NAACP, Headstart staff, members of various site-based management teams and of the PTA. All these meetings have been open, and I hope a11 of you who are interested will come -this Sunday, April 10th, at 3 pm to the Headstart building on Depew Avenue to hear some teachers who have been running an alternative-choice public school classroom for the last decade.
Before talking about what this strange thing called an
"alternative classroom" might be, I just want to underline that the idea is as open as the meetings. Hopefully, more parents and teachers will get Involved so the idea can Evolve! The same way that my two children are different, have different needs and different attention spans, and different ways of driving me crazy, our schools may need different approaches in education, I'm talking here about options. For example, one child might learn from a spelling test each Friday; one might not. That doesn't make spelling tests wrong or right. It just shows that each teacher and parent and child is a little different, and it raises the question of how we can help make our schools flexible enough to respond to that.What I'd like to do is brief1y summarize this proposal. If you'd 1ike the whole document, there's a sign-up sheet to get copies. There's also a hand-out to try to answer some of the most frequently asked questions. This is a DRAFT proposal. The point was to open a dialogue, and not, I want to add, a dialogue about this or that teacher or school, but a dialogue about how education happens - and how we all can help.
We all want our children to learn how to think.
This apparently simple goal is behind our drive to establish educational choice in Nyack. It is not a new goal. It is incorporated both in the District's mission statement and in the state-wide "New Compact For Learning." For more than a quarter century now, schoo1s have successfully used the concepts of 1earning by doing, open classrooms, multiple racial, social, and economic perspectives, as we11 as community and parental involvement.
Closer to home, Nyack is already using some of these elements. Whole language is based on the advantages of "real" books to teach reading; math manipu1atives use a hands-on approach; portfolio assessment is being tried in the early grades; official "tracking" has disappeared in the elementary schools; and there is a conscious attempt to head towards a multi-cultural curriculum. In this sense, our proposal is asking for classrooms which "connect the dots": pu11 these various elements together with an over-arching vision that not on1y provides chi1dren with ski11s but explores why those ski11s are important.
At the same time, we are interested in proven methods that go beyond what Nyack has done so far. We're looking to see public school classrooms that are non-graded, that don't rely on text books or worksheets, that encourage kids of different ages and backgrounds and abi1ities to come together- and learn by doing stuff they're interested.
Instead of 45 minute "bits" of learning and a rush to cover all the mandated information, we're talking about a p1ace where kids could get on the computer and track down some Haitian history, where a team of three kids and a local architect could try to design a whee1 -chair accessib1e playground , where the kid who loves numbers could help the kid who loves earthworms measure her collection.
While students would still take the district's standardized tests, instead of labeling the children fast or slow on a fixed scale, their work would be measured by where they started and how far they'd come. So they not only got the skills, but knew WHY they were getting them. By expanding the mandated curriculum, teachers would be able to teach more to the individua1. Parents could have a more active, on-going role in the c1assroom and in making decisions about their children's education. For example, up in Warwick, some of us visited a classroom that not only had four parents working on various skills from the computer- to a puppet show, but the teacher had a sign—up sheet -for working parents to help at home with things like cooking and music and grading papers.
We're looking to see public school classrooms where the terms "majority'" and "minority" don't apply, where grown-ups and kids alike learn to honor different perspectives, and which would include "handicapped" children along with "gifted" ones.
As parents, teachers, and community members, we respect that not all teachers and students desire this alternative . Which is why we support the concept of choice. There are many, many school districts across the country that offer this kind of educational option, we're trying to learn about them and see how what they've done might work in the Nyack district. If this sounds like some thing you're interested in, these are some of the areas that will need investigating:
How to measure learning, the pre-school connection, grant-writing, integrating technology into the classroom, finding speakers/ resources/ education models, and many more including a coordinating committee to keep a11 this working productively.
We suggest that parents and teachers who are interested have the option of taking part in such classrooms by the Fall of 1994. This plan will involve no extra cost to the district, (and may eventually save some money through multi-age groupings, less reliance on texts, etc.), it offers the chance for enormous benefits. If it meets with the district's approval, we are looking forward to a summer of parent and teacher training and an exciting new challenge in September!
There isn't time tonight to go into a whole lot of detail . But I'd 1ike to show part of a video that will give an idea of what this kind of classroom looks 1ike. Parents and teachers have visited public schools in New York City 1ike Central Park East and River East, in Croton-on-Harmon, in Warwick and elsewhere, and over and over again it seems that actually seeing this approach is worth a thousand words. So ....
SCREEN VIDEO
TAKE QUESTIONS
As of April 2000 the Nyack Board of Education has never formally responded to this presentation. Many of the goals stated are now impossible in the face of changes in education at the New York State level, however, the concepts and the goals we sought six years ago seem to have endured.
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