La Paz Intermediate Finds Benefits to Village Life

In fast-growing Orange County, where neighbors often don’t know each other’s names, small-town life is disappearing. But not at La Paz Intermediate School.

There, 160 kids, chosen from among the school’s 620 seventh-graders, are enrolled in the Village, an experimental program that stresses small-town accountability. The five teachers who run the program are responsible for the total educational, physical, social and emotional development of these pupils for the entire school year.

“We have the same 160 kids and the five of us see them every single day,” says Jim Lee, one of the teachers who helped create the program. “This allows us to get to know them better.”

The five teachers get together every day to talk to each other about their pupils, which helps them “tune into problems real fast,” says Noel Crawford, who teaches adolescent skills and science classes.

At a school with just one part-time counselor, that’s important, he says. One of the goals of the program is to provide more counseling to children who need it to prevent failure.

“On this campus we have a mandatory pass-fail,” says Jim Lee. “So we are coping with 12 to 20 kids per grade level who have failed and they become a negative role model on campus.”

Pupils in La Paz’s experimental Village were chosen before the start of the school year. Creators of the Village believe that the small-town atmosphere will be of special benefit for seventh-graders, who go from having just one teacher in the sixth grade to having five different teachers in junior high school.

“When the program first started we were accused of babying the children,” Crawford says, “but we said, ‘No, now our kids are accountable to someone the whole day.’ ”

Being in the Village is a lot like living in a small town where everyone knows what everyone else is doing. “On a campus (of 1,250 pupils) it is easy to lose your identity,” says Jennifer Maurer, a history teacher in the Village. “Being in a group of 160 gives them more of an identity.”

The Village also allows the children to get to know their teachers and encourages parents to become involved through special conferences and seminars. In addition to sharing the same five teachers, Village pupils also meet as a group and occasionally take field trips together. And their teachers plan classes around specific themes so the youngsters can see how various subjects relate.

“We take a theme and tie it to all the classes,” Maurer says. “For example, the kids created their own country. They learned about economy and government. They do a lot of cooperative learning.”

If the Village experiment is a success--and so far it is getting positive reviews from pupils, parents and teachers--the program will be expanded to include the entire student body, according to Lee. Pupils will be divided into villages of about 160, and each village will be run by five teachers in five different subjects (language arts, science, math, history and physical education). The teachers will not only function as instructional leaders of each village, but will be responsible for guidance and intervention when pupils need special help.

The innovative concept may even spread to other schools, Lee says. “We’ve had observers from all over come to see us,” he says. On Tuesday, for example, representatives from 11 different schools came to see the Village in action.

The La Paz program is funded by a $35,000 state grant as part of a nationwide effort called “restructuring,” which calls for fundamental changes in the way schools are organized. The restructuring movement asks schools to rethink the way they do business, and La Paz was selected from more than 1,550 applicants to take part in the program.

One of the goals of restructuring is to personalize education so that it meets the needs and learning styles of each child. At the same time, each pupil is expected to develop a positive work ethic that stresses behaviors such as reliability, punctuality, responsibility--behaviors often associated with “good citizenship.”

In the Village, pupils know that responsible behavior is expected of them and that if they act up in one class, news of such behavior will get back to teachers in their other classes. The upshot, says Lee, is that during the entire school year, only eight children have been referred to the principal’s office.

If a particular child is having a problem, he or she is identified early on and receives help--whether it be academic help or counseling.

Peer tutoring programs are available to pupils, and the Village has set up a Homework Hot Line where parents can call in and find out what homework has been assigned. Parents can leave messages for individual teachers through the hot line.

“The whole idea of the Village is that this is a small, intimate approach,” Lee says.

It’s an approach parents seem to like, he says. “We did a survey and did not get a single negative response.”

But it’s not perfect, Crawford points out. “I don’t want people to think that this is Utopia. A child can still fail, but we are trying very hard to make sure that they succeed.”