Safe harbor school

    In each classroom at the charter school, located at 240 E. Maple St., children are alert, and their conversations tend to stay focused on the subject matter.

    From kindergarten through the eighth grade, students often recite scripted answers to questions and equations in unison, taking cues from their neighbors when they forget a word or two.

    To avoid hurt feelings, policy prohibits saving seats in the lunchroom, where soothing, instrumental music accompanies meals. If a child is alone on the playground, it’s only a matter of time before a peer arrives to invite him or her to join in a game.

    And bullying is almost unheard of here.

    This scene is the result of an educational philosophy developed and practiced exclusively in Idaho known as the Harbor Method.

    In essence, the school strives to be a safe harbor for learning. Though any school administrator would agree a professional, worry-free environment is a worthy goal, officials with the academy believe the Harbor Method offers the right formula to get the job done.

    Creating an atmosphere of respect starts with the teachers. There is no teacher’s lounge at the academy. Having one, the teachers say, could tempt faculty to gossip.

    “Kindness and respect are the cardinal rules we focus on,” school Administrator Joel Lovstedt explained. “Whenever you have a list of rules, it’s an opportunity for somebody to find a loophole. But you turn that upside down and say, ‘Our policy is to be kind and respectful. Was that kind?’”

    Could it be that simple?

    Statewide, schools that teach the Harbor Method score in the 90th percentile on standardized tests for almost every grade.

    And there’s a waiting list to get a student into the academy, which has its enrollment capped at 280. The academy is still accepting applications and will host its annual lottery at 9 a.m. March 12 to determine which new students will be enrolled for the 2010-2011 school year.

    The academy opened in the fall of 2006 and is now planning to expand or move its facilities to add high school curriculum by the start of the 2011-2012 school year. The new high school would have a capacity of an additional 120 students.

    A subcommittee of the academy’s school board is investigating three options: build a new school from scratch at a cost of about $5.7 million, buy and renovate School District 25’s vacant Bonneville Elementary School building, which could be done for between $3 million and $4.2 million, or pay the owner of their current facility increased rent in exchange for him building an expansion on or near the school’s grounds on Maple Street.

Answers in unison

    Practicing vocabulary words is a daily highlight for academy students. They make it a game, performing gestures while they speak their answers.

    On a recent afternoon, Jo Bowen’s seventh-graders formed a row at the front of their classroom and commenced reciting definitions of terms from a list of 1,000 words high school students must know on the ACT and SAT college-entrance exams.

    “Usurp: Seize, grab,” they said, reaching for an imaginary object.

    “Excuse: Pardon,” they said, bowing together, unable to suppress their grins.

    Each class at the academy is expected to memorize a poem that teaches a moral lesson. At their teacher’s request, the seventh-graders recited “Count That Day Lost,” by George Eliot:

    “If you can sit down at set of sun and count the acts that you have done ...”

    Earlier that morning in Kelly Watson’s fifth-grade math class, students recited answers together to math terms and equations: “Ordinal numbers show order, not quantity. Please, you first.”

     As they added a host of lengthy numbers, the group said: “Bring down the 8, bring down the 7, bring down the 8.”

    Group answers are just one facet of the Harbor Method approach to education, but teachers say using choral recitation at points during the day enables children who don’t grasp a concept to hear the correct answers multiple times. Students also benefit from participating in a lesson without the stress of being called upon to answer concepts they haven’t mastered.

    “We want kids to hear things the correct way many, many times before we ask them to do it on a test format. If you don’t get it today, you’ll get it tomorrow,” explained Becky Stallcop, the inventor of the Harbor Method. “We also don’t pressure teachers to raise their scores. The minute you do that, teachers have a desperate sound in their voice. Do you get it?”

Origin of an Idaho curriculum

    All 10 schools that teach the Harbor Method are located in Idaho. Four of them have high schools.

    They tend to offer large class sizes — when discipline isn’t a problem, teachers can be effective with large numbers of students.

    The concept of the curriculum was born at Stallcop’s dinner table. Stallcop is the superintendent and principal of the original Harbor school, Liberty Charter School in Nampa. She was a second- and third-grade public school teacher at Star Elementary in Meridian when she first applied Harbor principles to the classroom.

    “I would listen to things my own children said at dinner, and it was always about unkindness, whether it was student to student or student to adult,” Stallcop said. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to make school an extension of the home?’”

    In her classes, she made a conscious effort to set equal expectations for low-income and minority students. She found they rose to the challenge. Discipline wise, she held students to the same standards as her own children.

    “I wanted to put out students who would be the ones who would get promoted and get raises in the workplace,” Stallcop said. “The whole premise of the Harbor Method is to prepare our kids to be great employees. The thing that matters most isn’t a high IQ. It’s effort and attitude.”

    Stallcop went on to become principal of a low-income school in Nampa, Lincoln Elementary. Within a year of taking the job, she improved the underperforming school’s test scores to the best in the district. Her classes offered a mixture of degrees of difficulty, including material from past lessons to keep it fresh in students’ minds and the hardest concepts well beyond grade level.

    “You make kids think they can do anything, and they do,” Stallcop said.

    Harbor Method principals are expected to follow Stallcop’s example and interact regularly with their students. She arrives at work at 5:30 a.m. each morning to get the paperwork out of the way. When students arrive, she’s in the classrooms.

    In Harbor schools, every eighth-grader spends two weeks working in the cafeteria kitchen with the principal.

    “That’s the roughest year for kids. They need to build relationships,” Stallcop said. “It’s a good year to be able to visit with them.”

    As an incentive to get the eighth-graders to work their hardest, Stallcop takes students who score an A plus for all 10 days of their cafeteria work out to lunch at Golden Corral. It seems the incentive has worked. Last year, she spent about $900 of her own money on students’ lunches.

Harbor Method comes to Pocatello

    The idea for a new charter school in Pocatello started with a conversation between local businessman Rich Kirkham and a colleague. Kirkham, who owns the facility where the academy is currently located, saw a need for more local public-school options.

    About three-and-a-half years ago, he assembled a founders’ committee to investigate different types of curriculum. They investigated about a half-dozen potential models before narrowing their choices down to the Harbor Method and a distance-learning curriculum called the K-12 Program.

    When members of the committee couldn’t agree on a choice, they decided to blend the curriculum and got a charter approved. A problem surfaced when the K-12 Program asked for an additional year to deliver curriculum specialized for their needs. Rather than wait, they returned to the State Charter Commission and requested approval for a charter focused only on the Harbor Method.

    “I love to watch those kids over there do their recitations and poems and see the way they behave in the classroom. There’s just a different feeling about it,” said Kirkham, whose own children attended the Pocatello Community Charter School.

    He agrees the Harbor Method isn’t for everyone, particularly for students who have behavioral issues.

    “I’m just one of those people who think we should have many options. In one family, one kid may be perfect for district schools and there’s another who’s perfect for a charter school. That’s what we learned as a family is choice is important.

    “We’ve see a movement in education over the past several years of whatever feels good, and we have to cater to the individual. You go to a Harbor School and there is discipline and there are consequences, and kids like that. We’re not going to fool around.”

The cost of choice

    Martha Martin, principal of the Pocatello Community Charter School, served on a team that conducted an early audit of the academy. She agrees with Kirkham about the importance of choice in education and the role charter schools play in providing it.

    The local charter school she heads teaches a curriculum called expeditionary learning, which focuses on learning through participation in hands-on activities.

    “The model they use is completely different from the model we use,” Martin said. “It really honors a parent’s right to choose the educational institution that best fits the learning style of their child.

    “Charter schools are all about choice for families. The fact that we have two charter schools in town, it’s really important that those two schools offer something completely different than the programs offered in the district. I think we do.”

    Critics of charter schools, including Dick Sagness, the retired dean of the Idaho State University College of Education, are convinced that choice is coming at the expense of the majority of the state’s public school students.

    Sagness, a Democrat who spent two years in the state Legislature filling in for Sen. Edgar Malepeai, introduced a bill seeking to place a moratorium on new charter schools. The bill was printed in the Senate Education Committee. Though the bill spurred a lengthy discussion on the editorial pages of Idaho newspapers, the committee’s chairman, Sen. John Goedde, R-Coeur d’Alene, wouldn’t allow it to be heard.

    Sagness likens charter schools to parallel school districts with less than adequate oversight. He noted the Legislature has made attempts to pass bills pushing for school district consolidations to cut costs.

    “Parallel school districts place an additional strain on school districts,” Sagness said.

    Advocates of charter schools note that the state funding follows the students. Sagness doesn’t buy it. If a child leaves for a charter school, it doesn’t change the fact that public schools still have to pay teachers, heat and maintain facilities, and operate school buses.

    “If we had all kinds of money so we could fund charter schools and traditional public schools and nobody was being adversely affected in the process I’d say, ‘Bless you.’ The fact is that’s just not the case,” Sagness said. “It’s choice for the few at the expense of opportunity for many.”

    Regarding the Academy at Roosevelt, Sagness considers the school to be a sort of educational franchise. He noted the purpose of charter schools is to test alternative models of education that could be used in other public schools. He doesn’t see that the academy is doing anything novel given the fact that several other Harbor Method schools exist in Idaho.

    Though he doubts it will ever happen, he would like to see the Legislature prohibit charter schools from being established independently of the public school districts in which they’re located. The Pocatello Community Charter School was approved through School District 25. However, the school district declined to approve a request made by the academy, so the academy got its charter directly through the Charter School Commission.

    The problem with that, as Sagness sees it, is that the academy’s school board members are voted in by academy families. Without the school district’s oversight, the school has no accountability to its community at large.

    “I’m paying for that school just like you are, and I really have no say. Frankly, there’s very little direct oversight that occurs whether it’s curriculum or budget,” Sagness said. “It’s a complex issue, but when you take it down to its basic terms it really isn’t. The parents are motivated people and they want the best for their child, but I’d like to think that all parents do.”

    In response, Lovstedt argued charter schools are held to a higher standard. If they fail to perform, they can be shut down, though the reverse is not true for public schools in general.

    “Charter schools are schools of choice, meaning parents can go there or not. Parents if they have their children in the public school and they don’t like it, what choice do they have?” Lovstedt.

A refuge from bullies

    One of the most recent students to transfer to the charter school is a seventh-grader named David. In the public school system he had so much trouble with bullies that he could focus on virtually nothing else.

    “My last school, I’d get beat up every day,” David said.

    Avoiding contact with the bullies didn’t help. They sought him out.

    “I’ve been through a lot of different schools trying to find one where I could feel safe,” David said.

    He knew immediately he’d found the right school the day he was introduced to Jo Bowen and her class.

    “I liked it. I actually wanted to come to school,” David said, adding he hasn’t had a problem with school bullies since then.

    The majority of his classmates indicated that they, too, have had problems with bullies at previous schools. One seventh-grade girl, Brielle, said she was picked on at a previous school for being too tall.

    Brielle explained when a student hurts a classmate’s feelings at the academy, it’s usually unintentional, and the offender will often make a sincere public apology.

    Lovstedt, who was a teacher, counselor and administrator in the Southern California public school system, said he has about one-tenth of the disciplinary problems as he’s had at other schools.

    “The kids here, there’s a goodness about them that makes it so pleasant to work here, not that I didn’t enjoy working in Southern California,” Lovstedt said. “Kids are kids no matter where you go. This particular school, it tends to bring out the best in them.”

    In the hallways, desks are set up for students who require additional one-on-one time with instructors. Lovstedt said the academy has a higher than usual enrollment of special needs students, who account for about 15 percent of the school’s total enrollment. They’re another population that seems to thrive under the Harbor Method.

    Eighth-grade teacher Peter Griffin explained, “Each of the students are given the opportunity to succeed at their own level, yet we challenge all of them to the highest standards with the curriculum we’re presenting them.”

    In a classroom where he and an assistant were busy dying marshmallows red to represent water molecules, science teacher John Lee echoed his colleague’s sentiments. Prior to joining the Roosevelt staff, Lee taught at the college level, where he was sometimes frustrated that students hadn’t picked up the same basic concepts they’re learning in his elementary classroom.

    In the three years that he’s taught at the academy, he’s been impressed by how little disruption behavioral problems have posed in class.

    “The worst language I’ve had to deal with is ‘crap’ and ‘sucks’ in three years,” Lee said. “The students here are comfortable saying, ‘Could you please be quiet? I’m here to learn,’ and they have the support of their classmates and teacher.”