Innovative School Puts Premium on Math, Science

Each morning, a gaggle of youngsters pours out of Kellogg Polytechnic School in Pomona and heads for an asphalt playground.

Their enthusiasm might suggest recess, but the elementary school students are beginning a science lesson. They spend an hour measuring the sun’s shadows, observing precipitation, jotting down the temperature and which way the wind is blowing.

Returning to their classrooms, the students explain their findings using math, drawings and poetry; some do their work on computers. The results are crammed into an ever-growing science notebook that teachers scrutinize throughout the year to monitor students’ progress.

At Kellogg, an innovative partnership among Cal Poly Pomona, Southern California Edison and the Pomona Unified School District is turning this poverty-racked school into an educational laboratory to try out new ways to teach math and science.

Those subjects, so critical to functioning in the 21st Century, are integrated into each class lesson. In addition to the three Rs, students at Kellogg learn how to plant and harvest pumpkins, plot the stars and planets on a computer, raise rabbits, make sundials and launch homemade rockets.

The curriculum began last fall, so results from standardized tests are not available. But officials at Kellogg say attendance has shot up. Students beg to stay after school to finish projects. Parents, many of whom come from rural Mexico or Central America, are dropping by throughout the day to gauge the progress of their children and pass on gardening skills.

Not that the inventive new partnership sprang up without problems. When Pomona Unified announced plans to restructure Kellogg as a polytechnic school, 19 of the 21 teachers left rather than dive into an experimental math and science program that would have forced them to overhaul longstanding lesson plans.

But advertising and word of mouth attracted teachers from throughout the San Bernardino area and east San Gabriel Valley who were eager to take part in an educational experiment.

“In my old position, I felt frustrated. I felt I didn’t have the support or freedom to do a lot of things I wanted to in a traditional setting,” said Barbara Grammier, who teaches a combination fourth- and fifth-grade class.

“The flyer I got said teachers would have an opportunity to try new things in science, and I wanted to work with innovative programs,” added Diane Betance, a bilingual resource teacher at Kellogg.

Cal Poly Pomona administrators tout Kellogg as a model that they hope to replicate at other schools and universities. But it remains to be seen whether the Kellogg program can be cloned successfully.

“Not every school has a university to work with, and we’re trying to find programs and activities that would work if resources are not immediately available,” said David Greene, dean of Cal Poly Pomona’s School of Education.

Mary Chambers, a vice president of LEARN, a coalition of Los Angeles business, civic and educational leaders attempting to restructure the Los Angeles Unified School District, says the Pomona project is “a little prairie fire of innovation.”

“It sounds very well-organized and terrific,” Chambers said. “If only all the schools were doing it to that extent.”

Kellogg offers a case study of the growing trend toward partnerships among school districts, businesses and universities. Chambers said there are about 1,000 different partnerships of various levels and intensities nationwide among schools, institutes, businesses and other groups.

Cal State L.A. recently announced plans for a partnership with Marshall Fundamental School in the Pasadena Unified School District. UCLA has long worked with a laboratory school called University Elementary School on the UCLA campus.

And spurred by Kellogg’s burgeoning success, Cal Poly Pomona is planning an International Polytechnic High School with the Los Angeles County Department of Education, a sort of magnet school for science to be located on the university campus.

Plans to overhaul Kellogg started three years ago, when the Pomona school district agreed to the total redesign of an elementary school. Kellogg Polytechnic was chosen because it is only blocks from the sprawling Cal Poly Pomona campus.

University professors helped redesign the curriculum, restructure the school and write grants, including one that netted the school an entire room of IBM personal computers.

Southern California Edison officials provided buses for field trips, facilitators for planning sessions, and corporate strategies that could be applied to the running of a school, says Tani Welsh, Edison’s manager of educational services. One Edison employee volunteered to teach Kellogg parents how to use the school’s computer lab.

For Edison, Kellogg “is a long-term investment in our future,” Welsh said. “We were interested specifically in this (partnership) because we think it’s a model for systemic change.”

Kellogg’s steering committee included members from all three organizations, plus teachers and parents. After two years of planning, the overhauled school curriculum and classroom organization was instituted last fall.

“We have this mandate to be different,” says Elene Kallimanis, a math-science resource teacher at Kellogg who also serves as a liaison with Cal Poly Pomona. “We decided we didn’t want the curriculum driven by textbooks, but by hands-on science and experiments.”

A decision was also made to turn Kellogg into a year-round school--not because of overcrowding but to keep students off the streets and out of trouble during the idle summer months and to reinforce academic lessons from earlier in the year.

The committee also decided to introduce an optional uniform program to save parents money and deter students from wearing gang colors. About 10% of the 568 students wear uniforms each day, Kallimanis says.

Instead of a traditional class structure, students are divided into five pods, or groups, that span age levels and offer opportunities for peer tutoring. Students are assigned teachers who stick with the pod from year to year, which encourages bonding between teachers and students, educators say.

“We’re creating families for them, because many of these kids don’t have stability in their home lives,” said Kallimanis, who formerly taught a science methods class in the School of Education at Cal Poly Pomona.

The highway between Cal Poly Pomona and Kellogg goes both ways. College professors can do observation and research at the school; elementary school students can visit the college campus regularly to become comfortable with the idea of higher education.

College tutors also are key players in the Kellogg program. One who visits several times a week is Robert Thomas, a senior majoring in microbiology. The 21-year-old African-American works with Antonio Taylor and David Morgan, both 7, on remedial science and reading.

“Kids here, they don’t get to see a lot of positive role models; there aren’t too many minorities getting into science,” said Thomas, taking a break from tutoring one recent day as Antonio and David, who are also African-American, basked in his grown-up presence.

“I think it’s important to show them science can be fun,” Thomas added. “Furthering your education has to be instilled at a young age.”

For Stan Bassin, a professor of physical education at Cal Poly, Kellogg provided an opportunity to test a health curriculum he spent years designing: TRAP--Tobacco Resistance Activity Program.

Mixing self-esteem education with lessons in science, physical education, drug awareness, parenting, health and nutrition, Bassin’s program has shown such promise that it is being expanded to more than half of Pomona’s 24 elementary schools, Bassin said.

Meanwhile, TRAP has expanded to regular health tests that measure students’ blood pressure, height, cholesterol and stress. This will allow Bassin to detect health problems as well as note change over time as his program is implemented at various schools.

Kellogg “served as a real lab, they allowed us to come in and they helped us learn as much as we helped them learn,” Bassin said. “That needs to be occurring throughout Southern California.”

Administrators for both the college and the elementary school discount concerns that students are being used as guinea pigs to test unproven theories.

“It doesn’t mean you run in and try anything,” said Ed Walton, a professor of chemistry and science education who helped coordinate the Kellogg program. “You have to be able to do things that if they don’t work, you don’t destroy the student.”

Of course, obstacles abound. Many Kellogg students come from single-parent households. Most are poor enough to be eligible for subsidized school lunches. Crime, including vandalism and drug abuse, is rampant in the neighborhood. About 11% of the students have been in the United States less than two years, and parents often uproot their children during the school year for extended vacations in Mexico.

Still, Sonia Blackman, a professor of psychology at Cal Poly Pomona who is gathering data to evaluate Kellogg, says anecdotal evidence abounds that the program is making a difference.

Blackman says more students are participating in the annual science fair. Student attitudes toward homework, school and teachers also have improved.

When a spate of graffiti hit the campus, outraged students identified the culprits and handed in their names to the principal. And the school’s garden was left untouched when an outbreak of vandalism swept the school last fall.

“I feel good about learning how to work in the garden,” said 9-year-old Lino Arreola, showing a visitor around the neatly plowed furrows. “We are having so much fun this year.”

More than 85% of Kellogg students said in a survey that they feel college is very important, and 38% listed math as their favorite subject, Blackman said. About 40% of the parents have visited Cal Poly Pomona and 93% said they feel welcome at Kellogg.

But Blackman says the real test will be how students perform once they reach junior high. At nearby Marshall Middle School, Principal Isidore Cabrera says Kellogg graduates already stand out.

“The kids from Kellogg have significantly higher grades, they’re used to carrying notebooks, doing homework, being ready to learn and working in groups,” Cabrera said.

“I can’t give you statistical data on this but I do notice a difference,” the principal concludes. “They’re nicer kids.”