Return to the September 1995 Table of ContentsBy Ferrel Guillory
Ferrel Guillory, southern correspondent for the News & Observer of Raleigh, is a writer in residence at MDC Inc., a nonprofit group in Chapel Hill, N.C., that researches economic development issues.
On a bright morning last May, shortly before New Hope Elementary School dismissed its students for summer vacation, Principal Bert L'Homme reached up to a shelf behind his desk, pulled down a thick spiral binder, and flipped through the pages outlining what he calls a "very ambitious summertime agenda."
For this technology-rich model school (K-5; enrollment 666) at a rural crossroads just north of Chapel Hill, N.C., challenges abound. L'Homme's binder has sections devoted to better methods of reporting student progress; new handbooks to communicate to parents, students, and staff members the special culture of the school; and the design of a consistent approach to faculty in-service training, among other topics. For New Hope, L'Homme said last spring, the approaching summer would represent an important moment for "a recapturing of its history and a restructuring of its program."
As implied by that weighty phrase, New Hope is not out to be just any elementary school. In fact, the school's summertime agenda -- and the decisions L'Homme and his faculty members reach as a result of it -- could have a ripple effect not only in the Orange County Schools but also in other districts in the state and beyond.
After all, New Hope was conceived as a lighthouse school, a model exerting an influence on public education beyond its own walls. It was also meant to signal that the region boasting the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina and the famous high-tech Research Triangle could be a leader in education reform, too.
New Hope was conceived in the late 1980s, when the council of governments of the Research Triangle organized a task force to design an education initiative uniting business, public education, and government. The distinguished roster of the task force included James B. Hunt Jr., now the state's governor, and an array of public school and university educators and representatives of such corporate powerhouses as IBM, Glaxo Inc., Northern Telecom, and Southern Bell.
Their goal was to combine the region's best thinking and substantial resources to create a model school that would serve the area's needs. Yet the experiment was intended to stay grounded in the local realities of population, governance, and budget. The model school, in effect, would be handed to the Orange school system, and it was to be governed and budgeted in the same way as the district's four other elementary schools.
Nor was anything special about the student enrollment. Of the current student body -- chosen according to the district's overall assignment plan -- 75 percent are white and 25 percent are black. About one-quarter of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches.
New Hope's distinction was to be its special blend of technology and innovative reform -- a mix that was planned exhaustively by parallel committees from the task force and the school district. The committees shaped the school's curriculum, the instructional setting and repertoire of technology, the organizational structure, staff development, parent and community relations strategy, and student evaluation methods.
A sparkling new school building was constructed, with a pale green roof above white outer walls and plenty of computer hookups. High-tech companies donated $1.5 million in computer, telephone, and video equipment. The school now has 233 workstations on its computer network, with six file servers. Each classroom has five or six computers for students, and every teacher has a personal computer.
But the New Hope model is about more than an infusion of technology. It features developmentally appropriate instruction for students in grades K through 5, with multiage grouping in each classroom. Instead of standard report cards, it employs narratives written by teachers to parents and portfolios assembled of students' work. What's more, New Hope is run by site-based management. Teachers participate in selecting new faculty and making recommendations to the principal about a range of management and curriculum issues.
"The intent of the model school is to bring these two strands -- technology and innovative organizational techniques -- together within the walls of one school to create a demonstration site that could expose teams of educators and policymakers to envision what education could be and should be in tomorrow's schools," declares the memorandum of understanding between the council of governments and the Orange school board.
Unfortunately, the experiment has yet to live up to the high hopes of its creators. Some observers believe the school spread its efforts across too many new ideas at once. And the school has discovered that its attempts at innovation run into funding barriers. The fundamental issue these days at New Hope is whether the school really can have staying power as a model school.
After it opened its doors in 1991, the school took off at a sprinter's pace. Led by Ruth Murphy, a charismatic educator who was the original principal, a faculty hired from throughout the school district worked hard to implement several reforms simultaneously. Principal Murphy left after two years to run an elite private school in Virginia. An interim principal served for a year while the system conducted the extensive search that ended with the hiring of L'Homme.
From the start, however, the experiment was sowing the seeds of its present difficulties. A "real jealousy issue" arose, says Susan Dovenbarger, an Orange school board member. "There has been a perception that there has been a brain drain, a teacher drain, to the model school," Dovenbarger says.
At the outset, New Hope advertised that it sought the best and brightest teachers from within the school system. That contributed to New Hope's image of elitism and rankled both parents and educators at neighboring schools, observers say.
New Hope's plentiful technology also raised a politically potent question of equity. School board members say they have faced pressure from their constituents to show that other county schools are not suffering because of an emphasis on New Hope.
Student achievement at the school, as measured by North Carolina's standardized tests, has been unspectacular. Since 1991, New Hope's overall ranking has climbed one spot -- from third to second -- out of the five elementary schools, but its performance hasn't been significantly better or worse than the others.
The 1995 scores on state-mandated proficiency exams in math and reading, have yet to be validated, but tentative results show the percentage of New Hope students proficient in reading and math has gone down among third-graders and up among both fourth and fifth-graders. On a fourth-grade writing test, New Hope jumped from having 22 percent of its students proficient in 1994 to 50 percent in 1995.
The principal chosen to reinvigorate New Hope's progress came from an unconventional source. L'Homme helped bring into existence the City Lights School of Washington, D.C. -- a school serving emotionally disturbed and delinquent inner-city young people. L'Homme was its principal for four years, its executive director for another seven.
"I'm not a typical principal," says L'Homme, a 45-year-old native of North Attleboro, Mass., with a doctorate from the University of Maryland. "I didn't get here by the normal route."
Since he arrived at New Hope, L'Homme has been working on the perception problems he inherited. He notes that now the school is "hiring from the same pool [of job applications] everyone else hires from." And to dispel any ill feelings, he has worked to build collaborative relationships with other principals.
Yet the faculty remains the school's strongest asset, L'Homme readily acknowledges. "The strength of this model school is not the lovely building, not the sophisticated technology, not the philosophy and theories," L'Homme says. "It's the dedicated, talented staff."
Dedication is evident in Linda Carver, a 19-year classroom veteran who teaches K-1 at New Hope. Carver recalls the "humongous workload" in getting the model school going -- how teachers often returned after dinner to work until the custodial staff closed the building at 11 p.m. Even now she regularly works from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m, Carver says. "I don't know how you can explain how hard it was," she says.
The heavy faculty workload, says L'Homme, stems from two factors. First, because New Hope is run by site-based management, teachers have added responsibilities for governing the school. Second, instead of following a text and a prescribed course of study, New Hope teachers are expected to come up with a developmentally appropriate program for their students. That means, says L'Homme, they "literally design a program for each child in their classroom."
One of Carver's methods, for example, is to have her kindergarten and first-grade students write in a journal every day. She reviews the journals to teach spelling and punctuation. Twice a week, Carver's students put their journals into a computer. They haven't learned keyboarding, so they hunt-and-peck. But they have learned some function keys, enabling them to search for a picture to illustrate their stories. "[They] have to publish two pieces a week," she says. "It really helps the kids with letter recognition and with stick-to-it stamina."
The difficulty of striking into uncharted domains of teaching -- much more arduous than following the deep groove of a traditional lesson plan -- is one reason L'Homme believes innovative programs like his need extra resources of staff and money. For example, it's "a necessity" for a school like New Hope to have a technology coordinator -- until recently, a rarity in area schools -- to give teachers help in selecting classroom software. And that's not to mention keeping equipment up and running: When a printer breaks down with a student's work jammed in the innards, a teacher needs someone to respond quickly, he says.
Yet New Hope remains a "model school with a regular school budget [and] a regular school allocation of teachers," L'Homme says. But it was not until this past school year that New Hope got its own technology coordinator as a faculty member. To hire her, New Hope's teachers had to vote to leave a classroom position vacant -- meaning that some teachers would have larger classes.
On par with its sister schools, New Hope's annual budget provides $92.85 per student for instruction, including the purchase of texts, copy paper, and other materials, and $35.95 for equipment. But New Hope's heavy load of technology puts a greater strain on those sums than at other schools. More of its operations budget goes to maintaining equipment.
A similar argument can be made about the school's $10.20 per student for staff development. "Teachers really need training in multiage and in how to handle it, or they will get discouraged," says Carver.
Four years into the New Hope experiment, some teachers believe the time has come to, in their words, "start fine-tuning" New Hope and to "make some hard choices."
L'Homme, after his first academic year at the school, agrees that several key issues raised by the model school must be addressed, including the issue of how teachers report student progress. Although a narrative approach to report cards can lead to strong communication between teachers and parents, he says, narratives lack a certain uniformity. Or, as L'Homme puts it, "29 teachers in 29 classrooms, and there were 29 systems of reporting student progress." L'Homme has in mind a hybrid system that combines a rating system with a narrative section.
Now, too, comes "the grind part," observes School Board Member Ralph Warren of the task L'Homme faces. He adds that L'Homme has to shift the school from a 100-yard dash to a two-mile run.
Donald Stedman, dean of the school of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says L'Homme must find "reasonable middle ground" in deciding what to preserve and what to change among the reform efforts. "Bert has to turn the ideal into the reality, but he can't follow the exact same script [as before]," says Stedman, who served as task force vice chairman and helped recruit L'Homme.
Stedman, who has monitored New Hope's course, says the school is a case study of the challenge of being a model school. "From my point of view, the school had been a great success. But from the point of view of its original aspirations, it has not yet reached a successful operation."
Even so, in the view of Stedman and others, New Hope has played a role in raising the expectations in the county. Ralph Warren, for instance, contends that the presence of New Hope helped win voter approval of a $52 million bond issue. Included in the bond package was $600,000 a year to upgrade technology in other schools.
As he looks ahead to his second year at New Hope, L'Homme describes the school as "being pushed to the limit" -- not just by the challenge of reform -- but by enrollment growth that has outstripped the 550-student design capacity by more than 100. The pressure to perform is great, L'Homme admits. "[With] everything that occurs, we're under the microscope." And part of that pressure is self-imposed. Not only do "our parents really expect our students to do better," says the principal, but New Hope's teachers "are not pleased" with the uneven test results.
Though he has confidence in his faculty, L'Homme won't discount the importance of funding. "New Hope is always going to be nipping at the tail of greatness, but it is always going to be just out of our reach unless the community is willing to commit the resources that are necessary to work with the children who are coming into our school," he declares.
Eager to serve as his school's advocate, L'Homme is also ready to lead his teachers into their model school's crossroads moment.
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