Classroom Experiment Will Face a Crucial Test

Allison Peck, 9, thrust her hand into a dark, shallow pond in the rain forest section of the Life Lab Garden at Meadows Elementary School on Monday, examining the tadpoles and their metamorphoses still in progress.

One animal, she noted, had four legs and looked like a frog but still had a tail like a tadpole.

“This is so much funner than the classroom, and it helps because you have a visual picture,” she said.

The garden, in which students created microcosms of various regions of the state and world, is part of the “being there” and “meaning-based learning” philosophy of Meadows Elementary School’s pilot program.

“If you’re going to teach about pond life, what better way than to build a pond?” asked Principal Tim Stephens.

The program, implemented three years ago as a trial, now needs approval from the Conejo Valley Unified School District board of trustees to become permanent. The board will hear from teachers and parents Wednesday and vote next month on whether to continue or scrap the popular pilot.

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Meadows Elementary, which has a waiting list of 60 students for the fall, is popular among many parents who want their children to learn in a more creative, less structured atmosphere, but has drawn criticism from two school board members who stress the importance of fundamentals.

In addition to nontraditional teaching methods that use themes to bring relevance to math, reading and writing, the school also uses a report card without grades, evaluating students on a continuum of progress and skills competency instead.

The school board will also discuss Wednesday whether to continue a pilot program at Sequoia Intermediate School that reworked schedules so that students study three longer classes each day, covering six topics per semester.

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According to school surveys, 77% of parents at Sequoia like the program and 68% of students endorse it. A similar pilot program was made permanent at Newbury Park High School last year on a 4-1 vote.

Meadows’ pilot faces strong opposition from two school board members, who have criticized the plan from the beginning for its nontraditional approach.

“I’m all for hands-on experience and theme teaching,” said board member Elaine McKearn. “But studying about our Constitution and our founding fathers seems to be de-emphasized. I suspect they are stretching the issues like multiculturalism and environmentalism and disregarding things of historical significance.”

Board member Mildred Lynch said the fundamentals are lacking at Meadows. She criticized the school’s decision not to use grades, its lack of emphasis on textbooks and its approach to teaching spelling.

“Kids can have fun at home,” said the former teacher. “Let’s learn something at school.”

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Parent Tara Kadium said she moved her two children out of Meadows earlier this year after they demonstrated problems in reading and math. As an example, she cited an instance in which her son’s first-grade classroom went out to “see nature” and returned to the classroom to write about it.

“But my son can’t spell, let alone know sentence structure, so how can he write?” she asked.

She said both her children had made “remarkable progress since they had been moved to Conejo School.”

But parent Judy Gindi said her two children are excelling at Meadows.

“I have a second-grader who is writing stories 10 pages long, with incredibly descriptive adjectives,” she said. “The way they encourage students at this school is very special.”