Unusual three-way alliance strives to make Madrona School better
 |
|
||||||||||
Holding catered staff workshops in places like the Washington Park Arboretum may be a little thing.
Getting a new copy machine and $300 more a day for classroom supplies may not be huge, either.
But those extras for the Madrona School, made possible by a three-way partnership of the school, the University of Washington College of Education and private donors, mean a lot.
Fourth-grade teacher Andy Olsen can't say enough about how important "little things" are.
"It makes you feel good," Olsen said. "It makes you feel important. It makes you feel valued."
Making teachers feel honored is one goal of the partnership, whose donors have pledged $1 million to the school over five years. The ultimate goal, though, is boosting academic performance in a school that has struggled with low test scores and been abandoned by many neighborhood parents.
Since the Advanced Progress Program for gifted students moved out of Madrona in 1997, it has been the first choice of fewer than one-fifth of students. Seventy percent of students are African American, and 73 percent qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches.
The school is changing rapidly.
Staff turnover - high the previous two years - shows signs of slowing in Rickie Malone's second full year as principal.
The school added eighth grade this year and will move to the former Lincoln High School in September while Madrona is rebuilt.
Although not the most expensive adoption of a Seattle school, the Madrona partnership is unusual. It combines philanthropy with a commitment by UW education professors to help with planning and training.
By tying decisions to staff-developed academic goals and by giving the faculty a say in all partnership spending, the school hopes to avoid the suspicion and anger that followed businessman Stuart Sloan's adoption of nearby T.T. Minor Elementary School in 1998.
"We particularly didn't want to be ... coming into a school... trying to tell the school what they should be doing," said Roger Rieger, a real-estate investor who - with his wife, Annette - has pledged $500,000 to Madrona. The pledge is part of the couple's 1998 commitment to give $1 million to help at-risk students in Seattle schools.
The staff and their partners decided they wouldn't phase in their efforts, as T.T. Minor did. All students would benefit equally.
Additions to staff
Since the partnership went into full swing last fall, it has paid for one full-time and several part-time teaching assistants, lunchroom and playground supervisors and a full-time volunteer coordinator.
In creating those jobs, school officials have looked for African Americans - particularly men - who can serve as role models for black students. They also have sought to bring more parents into the school.
Decisions about how to spend the money are made by an oversight committee composed of Madrona teachers and administrators, UW educators, benefactors, a parent and someone from the community.
The business partners, led by Rieger and stockbroker Ernie Burgess, also have bought a copy machine, a dozen computers for a kindergarten and first-grade reading program and paid for a Christmas party complete with gifts for homeless students.
For the Riegers, the Madrona partnership represents a return to a familiar school. The couple first came to the school in 1988, when they told 82 sixth-graders that if they graduated from high school and went to college or technical school, the "I Have a Dream" program would pay $1,000 of their annual tuition.
Ten years and a half-million dollars later, many have graduated from the UW, Whitman, Amherst, Boston College and other colleges.
The Riegers later created the "R Team" at Garfield and Hale high schools, motivating students by paying them for high grades.
The Riegers asked Burgess and his wife, Diane, former neighbors and longtime friends, to join them doing work for public schools.
Among their projects are the "Love 'em and Lead 'em" scholarships - named after a slogan of late superintendent John Stanford - given each year to two educators who graduate from UW's Danforth Educational Leadership Program and agree to work as principals in Seattle schools for at least four years.
Rieger and Burgess suggested to Danforth staffers the idea of creating a partnership to help an elementary school.
After looking at several prospective partners, the philanthropists and university educators decided Madrona best fit the bill of a school with serious academic needs, leadership and a location accessible to UW professors and students.
The partners were particularly impressed with Malone, a longtime educator who left the African American Academy in 1999 to take over at Madrona.
"Her vision of what the school could become was pretty compelling," said Kathy Kimball, executive director of the Danforth program.
Malone, a diminutive, bespectacled woman full of energy, is described as passionate and committed.
After the Riegers and Burgesses committed $150,000 a year to the school for five years, they recruited others - biotech entrepreneur Glenn Kawasaki, investment manager Eric Dillon and his wife, Holly, and an anonymous donor - to give $50,000 more a year cumulatively.
The UW partners see Madrona as "a living laboratory" that could become a model for improving other schools, Kimball says.
Kimball participates in the partnership, along with UW education professors Ed Taylor and Gene Edgar and Danforth associate John Morefield. Morefield is a retired principal legendary for his commitment to Hawthorne Elementary parents that their children would be working at or above grade level when they graduated.
'Blood oath'
Changing an entire school is not something done quickly, so the partners "took a blood oath" that they would stick together for five years, Rieger said.
Malone says she and her staff were at first suspicious of the partners.
But after getting to know them, she says, "it became apparent they want absolutely nothing except what we want: the best-educated children."
School officials and the partners also want to prove that Madrona students can succeed academically, a goal they realize will take some work. Madrona children were in the 34th percentile last year on the math portion of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and only 16 percent of fourth-graders passed the writing test on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning.
The overwhelmingly African-American student body is taught by a mostly white faculty - a challenge, says Malone, who is black, because it is important for students to see role models who look like them.
Many of the better-off families in the neighborhood have sent their children either to private schools or to more popular public schools such as McGilvra, Stevens and Montlake.
The "Madrona Moms," mothers whose preschoolers play together, have begun to support Madrona in the hope that its academic rigor will improve.
"We talk about how many of us would like to send our kids to public school," said Shelley Huestis, a Madrona Mom who has a 17-month-old son and is secretary of the PTSA. "We would like Madrona to be a viable option. Now the school is not in good shape."
Rieger and Burgess, accustomed to the faster-paced business world, have found working with the bureaucracy of a large school district excruciatingly slow. The Seattle School District's cumbersome purchasing rules became apparent when the school used partnership money to buy a copy machine.
"In a business, how long would it take you to get a copy machine if you needed a copy machine?" Rieger asked. "It would take a day or two. I believe it took us six weeks ... and we were willing to pay for it. Schools are not easy to help."
The businessmen bypassed the bureaucracy to quickly put a cell phone into the hands of Felicia Brown, a parent who had been hired as the school's volunteer coordinator.
Participants in the partnership believe they will succeed in raising academic standards at Madrona. They say they have the right people on the team, benefit of the university professors' knowledge and donors' financial resources.
"I suppose we will do nothing that hasn't been tried before," Morefield said. "That's as it should be because there are plenty of proven strategies out there. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. What we need to do is put in place what we know works."
Keith Ervin can be reached at 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com.