Bullying hurts kids’ performance in school, but schools have trouble responding. Victims fear shame and retaliation so they don’t report, and some institutions fail to respond to reports for fear of besmirching their reputations. A Santa Cruz group called Kidpower plans to equip kids with effective social responses as well as some physical ones.

Photos: Lillian Mongeau

KidPower instructors say a bully is anybody who uses words or actions to belittle victims. That includes all forms of sexual harassment. At a class for teens on a recent Sunday, a dozen girls practice dealing with men who toss out cat-calls and even get up to block the girls’ way.

“ Heeey,” a male coach purrs.

“Get ready,” says Irene Van der Zande, an instructor who is also the founder of Kidpower.

“Stop right there,” the girl responds.

“Oh, c’mon, you totally look like somebody I know,” says the male coach.

“Turn around and leave,” Van der Zande says.

“Turn around and leave,” the girl repeats with force. Then she walks past the man. Once she’s past, Van der Zande coaches her to glance behind her to make sure the man isn’t following.

The scene takes place in a sun-lit classroom at the Aptos Montessori School, not on an abandoned city street. It’s hard for some of the girls not to grin and giggle as they practice in front of their friends. Van der Zande tells the girls it’s important to also practice being serious.

Padded instructor Ryan Holmes says he hopes the role he plays helps the girls stay safe in a potential real-life situation.

“Women are socialized to smile when we set boundaries,” she says. “If you have trouble here, don’t worry about it.” She assigned the girls homework: “practice looking in the mirror until you can say, ‘Stop right there,’ without smiling.”

Even though they’re only 14, students Hannah and Isabella say they’ve already had guys cat-call them. Isabella says the class is turning out to be more useful than she’d expected when her mother made her sign up.

Having a Response Ready

“I definitely think about it on my own on the street,” Isabella says. “So it’s nice to know what to do besides what just pops in your head randomly.”

KidPower offers classes in “knowing what to do” for kids from toddlers to teens. They teach at schools and by request for private groups, like these girls, who know each other from bible study. In addition to teaching the girls how to respond verbally to unwanted attention, the instructors teach basic self-defense moves. The girls learn to use their feet and knees and elbows to fend off attackers. They practice on their male instructors who are now covered in thick padding. The girls even practice poking their instructors in the eyes and grabbing and twisting their, well, Isabella will explain it:

“We have to grab a little rubber toy he stuck down his pants and grab it and squeeze it to protect ourselves,” Isabella says.

She says she’s not comfortable doing it but that it’s probably an important thing to know how to do.

For his part, padded instructor Ryan Holmes says he hopes the role he plays helps the girls stay safe in a potential real-life situation.

“Unfortunately, it’s more realistic that men are the type that are causing fights,” he says.

A Voice Can Make a Big Difference

Even after an hour of getting beat up in the name of safety though, Holmes says he always uses his voice before his fists. He put that into action recently when he came upon a fist-fight in downtown Santa Cruz.

“I was about 30 feet away and I yelled about as loud as I’ve ever heard myself yell,” Holmes says. “I said, ‘Get off him now.’ And the man that was attacking the other man jumped off the guy and staggered back like he’d been hit and he got on his bike and he rode away.”

The lesson, Holmes says, is that size doesn’t matter when saying the right thing has the power to stop an attack.

Kidpower website.

A Bright Prospect crew member leads high school students on a tour of UCSC. Photo: Lillian Mongeau

By Lillian Mongeau

When a group of college freshmen give a group of high school seniors a campus tour, they cover the important things first: co-ed restrooms.

“So you can shower and a girl’s doing her hair, or if you’re a girl you can go in, and a guy’s shaving…” Adam Villa-Lobos earns laughs with this.

It’s a cool evening in October at U.C. Santa Cruz. Both the students getting the tour and the students giving it hail from Pomona near Los Angeles. They are all part of a program called Bright Prospect, that focuses on getting low-income kids into college. Villa-Lobos is one of the guide. He says college was pretty far from his mind when he was 14.

“I always thought, ‘How can I care about school when I go back to a home full of about 15 people and my cousins who are gang-related and they always smoke weed and drink,’” he says. “I saw my cousins doing stuff like that and all I know in the back of my head was, I don’t want to do like that, that’s something I just don’t want to do. ”

A change in what’s possible

But Villa-Lobos says he didn’t know how to do anything else, so he had a hard time feeling invested in school. One day, a teacher plunked down a stack of college pamphlets in front of him.

“I saw U.C. Santa Cruz on top of the pamphlets and I’m like, that’s not a school,” he says.  “You’re telling me there’s schools, there’s  classrooms inside the forest? She’s like, yeah.”

Villa-Lobos says the notion that he could go to school in the woods changed what he understood as possible. He had a goal to shoot for now: U.C. Santa Cruz. When he heard of a non-profit called Bright Prospect that would help him reach his goal, he signed right up.

The program provides college advising and financial help. But Director Timothy Sandoval says the most important thing they provide is a community committed to getting each Bright Prospect student to college.

“We can’t approach college as an individual family,” Sandoval says. “That hasn’t worked for our community.”

Turning around college retention

The Bright Prospect program is working. Nearly all of the high school students they support matriculate into college. And 95 percent of those who start college graduate within 6 years. Nationally, only 11 percent of low-income college students graduate in that time.

But Sandoval says many of their graduates still weren’t able to find work. It’s not just that the economy is tough.

“They just, again, don’t have the advantage of having an uncle or an aunt or a cousin or an older brother or sister who’s very well-connected to opportunities, so we have to help them build those opportunities,” he says.

Villa-Lobos seems to be a perfect example of this need.

“I can’t call my parents and I can’t call my brothers or sisters and say like, ‘how do you talk to your professor?’” he says, “because I’m the first sibling in my family to go to college. And the way I can do that is basically with people in my Crew.”

So, in 2009, Bright Prospect began actively teaching networking skills. Now, kids from different high schools who attend the same college are put into groups the summer before they start. These groups are called Crews and they are meant to lean on each other and provide the seed for building a bigger network by graduation.

It seems to be working for Villa-Lobos. Recently he found one of his classes difficult and brought it up with a classmate who is also a fellow crew member:  “He’s like let’s go talk to the professor. And I was like, it’s kind of awkward. But he’s like, let’s just go, we need help.  So, we go talk to the professor and it was just easy – a simple conversation. And I think the fact that I had someone to rely during college, it makes everything easier.”

Easy enough, the hope is, that Villa-Lobos will make it through graduation and all the way to his next goal: to work at Pixar.

Monique MacDaniels contemplates a gumboot chiton. A field trip to Pigeon Point was part of her recent session at an Upward Bound college preparatory summer school. Photo: Lillian Mongeau

By Lillian Mongeau

Over the past few weeks dozens of teens from western states have been studying math and biology in Santa Cruz as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Upward Bound program. The goal of the program is to get low-income students and “first generation” students into college. Lillian Mongeau has the story of one participant who says Upward Bound is just the helping hand she needs:

Monique

Monique MacDaniels has just met the people she’s about to live with for the next four weeks with and she’s beating them at cards.

“Champion!” she says playfully. “Who wants to play me?”

Monique is sixteen. She’s from Chico, California. She has an easy smile and perfect posture. Her arms and shoulders are muscular from performing on a competitive cheerleading team back home. Today, she’s one of about a dozen teenagers arrayed around a coffee table in the common room of a residence hall at U.C. Santa Cruz. It’s day one of Math and Science Upward Bound, a month-long academic program to give low-income kids a boost on their way to college.

“People may think we’re nerds or we’re not that cool, but we’re all having fun right now. So we’re obviously kind of cool,” she says.

Coach Tiffany Hayes definitely thinks Monique is cool. She runs the Chico Cheer All-stars. She says Monique is one of her best athletes and one of her hardest workers.

“People really look up to her on the team,” Hayes says, “even the older kids look up to her. She’s very self-sufficient. She participates in everything we do at the gym, whether it’s mandatory or not.”

The Necessity of Self-Reliance

That self-sufficiency and stellar work ethic have been born out of necessity. Monique is a foster kid. She’s never met her biological parents. She was adopted at age three by the family who was fostering her. Then, as she put it, “things didn’t work out.”

“I had to grow up way too fast and witness things I shouldn’t have. But those things did make me who I am. Those things matured me faster and made me a dynamic person.”

One of the constants for Monique has always been school.

“It’s one thing that’s completely me, it has nothing to do with where I am living, who I am living with, what’s going on. I can always take my books and go outside, take them to a friend’s house, I can do them in my room. School, I think, really shows you who you are and how determined you are about your life.”

Three years ago, Monique settled in with a foster family she clicked with. Her foster mother’s encouragement is one reason she’s at Math and Science Upward Bound. A week and half into the program, Monique’s back in the common room, this time for class. A small laptop is propped on her knees. She’s trying to work out a college schedule that would meet all the requirements for freshman year.

The Nitty-Gritty of College Life

“I’m trying to make this schedule, but I’m trying to leave time for me to study or, you know, eat. … You think ‘Oh, in college you can take whatever classes you want, it’s easy.’ It’s not that easy.”

Monique says she hadn’t thought about the small things that can make college a challenge, like leaving time to walk across a sprawling campus from one class to another. Her instructor, Julia Ramirez, says too many of these small confusions can spell disaster for a first generation college student.

“Look at all these, there’s like 100 English classes,” Monqiue says.

“Yeah,” Julia responds, “that’s why it’s always good to talk to your counselor because they’ll guide you to what classes you need to take and just keep on top of it.”

“Did you go to your counselor a lot?”

“Yeah. She’s like my best friend,” Julia says, laughing. “But, I mean, after the first year you get a hang of what classes you want to take and it won’t be so hard.”

Monique thinks this program could make or break her chances of success in college. She’s grateful for it. And she wants taxpayers to know it’s worth it.

“While they are helping the youth of my generation in the next generation that youth will soon grow up to support them; it’s a circle,” Monique says. “All the kids here I can definitely vouch want to do something with their lives. If they didn’t they would have never signed up to spend a month of their summer in a college program.”

Monique’s current career goal is to be a life coach.

Teens studying math and biology at a summer session of the Upward Bound program delve into tide pools near Pigeon Point. Photo: Lillian Mongeau

By Lillian Mongeau

It’s 7 a.m. at Pigeon Point, a rocky beach 30 miles north of Santa Cruz. The chilly grey sky swirls overhead as 52 high school students grab clipboards and buckets and clamber into the frigid waters.

I get the attention of the kids’ marine biology instructor, Amanda Cohen. She’s handing out equipment and urging kids towards the water. Like the students, she’s clad in a thick neoprene wetsuit.

In the Field Wading

“It’s one thing for them to see it in the aquarium,” Cohen says. “It’s another thing to get out here and discover what’s on the rocks, what’s under the rocks and kind of get over that fear of being in the water.”

This tidepooling trip comes mid-way through a month-long residential program meant to give these kids a boost on their way to college. The program is called Math and Science Upward Bound. To qualify, kids must come from families that earn less than $24,000 a year or be part of the first generation in their families to attend college. Two thirds are both. They pay nothing to attend.

Suddenly squeals erupt nearer the water. Tens are shouting: “What is it!?” “I don’t know put it back!”

The discovery of a gumboot chiton causes squeals to erupt among these avid biology students. Photo: Lillian Mongeau

The subject of all this terror is a dark pink…creature. They’ve scared it, so it’s curled into a ball the size and shape of a brain. A few kids think it probably is a brain. They call Cohen over to straighten things out.

“So what I think you guys found is a gumboot chiton,” Cohen says. “He’s all curled up because he’s keeping his guts protected.”

College Prep

Janine Wilson runs the summer program. She wants students to get a taste of the college life. She says the program is so intense the students have to want to be there if they’e going to succeed.

“They spend all day in school. They have two hours of recreation in the afternoon, and in evening, it’s back to study hall and guest speakers, and presentations.”

Julia Ramirez is a program graduate and current instructor. She says wanting to go to college and knowing how to get there are not the same thing.

“Ever since I was little, like my mom would always tell me…, ‘I came here and I have no other option but to be a housekeeper,’ because that’s the only job she could get,” Ramirez says. ” She would always tell me, ‘I want you to go to college, I want you to get an education,’ … but I didn’t know how to get there.”

A Little Help Can Go A Long Way

Ramirez is a junior in college now. She credits Upward Bound with showing her the way.

“I was really happy when I got in the program because it was just like wow, like this is how you get there? Oh my God, I would’ve never figured this out on my own,” she says.

Many don’t figure it out. Just over half of low-income high school graduates even enroll in college. Of kids who participate in the Santa Cruz Upward Bound summer program, 91 percent enroll. But even when low-income students get to college, many don’t make it through. A Pell Institute study on college completion shows that only one in 10 low-income college students graduate in six years. In contrast, eight in 10 graduates of the Santa Cruz summer program stay in college through senior year.

Back at the beach, student Kajdro Ned is standing on the shore, shivering in a short-sleeved wetsuit.

“I feel like a marine biologist,” Ned says. “Like I got promoted. From a high school student, to a marine biologist, yeah.”

Feeling like that, program leaders say, allows Ned and students like her to envision themselves as professional scientists. A vision that can turn into a concrete career goal. A goal that will pull students all the way through college.

Brian Gonzalez (far right), his students and the American Heart Association team gather on the steps of the Capitol Building in Sacramento after their Legislative Day of Action. Photo: Lillian Mongeau

It’s a hot afternoon in March in South Central Los Angeles. Luckily, there’s air conditioning inside Ánimo Ralph Bunche Charter High School where the honors history class has a guest speaker: Jacqueline Hernandez works on government relations for the American Heart Association. She’s here as part of the Association’s Youth In Action program. Her goal is to teach kids how to push for changes in their communities by speaking directly to politicians. She uses health issues as her example.

“They don’t really think about tobacco prevention and policy work and how it’s really implemented and how that affects them,” she says.

History teacher Brian Gonzalez says his students can take that lesson and apply it to other issues.

“For them to feel that they can not only formulate and develop a plan for change, but go through all the different steps, it gives them that sense of empowerment… That they can say wow, I’ve been there, I can do it again and it’s not that hard,” Gonzalez says.

The Heart Association offers Youth In Action to students at two California high schools. Those students are about to travel to Sacramento to explain to elected officials why it’s important to support “heart healthy” legislation. Student Alex Venosa says he is excited to promote Proposition 29, which would levy a new tax on cigarettes meant to fund programs that would help people quit smoking.

“My uncle is a smoker. And I told him, ‘what if you were to get free help?’” Alex says.  “And he’s like,  ‘I guess I would take it.’ And that’s what I really wanted because a lot of my uncles are very heavy smokers and I just don’t want to see them pass away due to smoking.”

Kids go to Sacramento to talk with lawmakers
Alex is a big kid with a bright smile. He says he’s more nervous about getting on a plane for the first time than he is about talking to lawmakers.

“I’m pretty excited. I want to let them get my message, you know? I want them to go ahead and be on our side and support us so it can be able to pass. ”

A week later Alex and his team, one other student, two volunteers, a team leader and teacher Gonzalez, are on the third floor of the Capitol Building looking for Senator Tom Berryhill’s office. Alex has two meetings under his belt and his optimism hasn’t flagged. The group leader is Ray Durazo of the American Heart Association. He starts explaining Senator Berryhill’s politics as the group dodges the crowds in the hallway. Amidst capitol crowds, Durazo explains Berryhill’s politics mean that he might not be sympathetic to Proposition 29.

“Now I’m scared,” Alex says. “I don’t know. I’m scared now. I did so good in the first one. Right now, he goes against it…it’s going to hurt.”

Presenting their case on health related legislation
There are three pieces of health related legislation the group is presents to Berryhill. They take turns telling the senator about the different topics. Arlene Zargoza, the other student in the group, is in charge of talking about a bill that would require hospitals to check infants for heart defects.

She looks nervous. She glances at the group leader and he takes up where she left off. Alex does not look nervous. He’s presenting Prop 29 and when it’s his turn, he launches in full force.

“Okay, so Prop 29 is basically something where we want to raise the taxes on tobacco from $0.87 where it sits at currently to $1.87,” he says. “Now a dollar may not seem much, but if you think about it, every time you add a pack of tobacco that’s $1 you’re adding that you wouldn’t normally waste.”

Alex’s spiel goes on for a good four minutes. He cites dollar amounts and health statistics from memory. Then he wraps it up with the story about his uncle.
Berryhill listens politely, but he says: “As far as Prop 29, I’m not going to touch that with a 10-foot pole in here because it is a campaign issue and with my profile, we can’t talk about that in these offices. ”

A dose of reality
Despite his blunt refusal to discuss Prop 29, Berryhill encourages the students to come back.

” I would like to say that what you kids are doing is important, because education of all these legislators up here, that’s how you get things done up here,” Berryhill says.

Learning how things “get done” in Sacramento is exactly what the program’s leaders are hoping for. At the end of the day, Alex and Arlene’s teacher asks them if the want to talk to the assembly member from their district. They do. Especially Arlene.

“All the, like, littering around our school?” she says. “Because even like around our block, there’s a whole bunch of mattresses and just junk that really needs to go because it’s not a good image for our school.”

” Graffiti?” Alex says. “Because it just continues on to the stereotype of South Central being a bad place to live in.”

A staffer named Luis Quinonez is happy to sit with them. To everyone’s surprise, it is Arlene who starts off the conversation.

” Good afternoon. My name is Arlene Zargoza,” she says. “I’m from South Central Los Angeles. There’s a lot of littering around our school and there’s more than like minor trash, there’s mattresses and used sofas.”

Arlene and Alex also explain that they’ve held several clean-up days, only to have the junk show up again. Quinonez promises to be in touch and he takes down their emails. He also gives each of them a business card. Later, outside the Capitol Building, Arlene and Alex are glowing.

“If you have something that you want to change about your city or wherever you’re from, you should try to make a change for it,” Alex says. “Go ahead and talk to your senators, to your legislators.”

Arlene adds: “And I know that if you need to advocate for something than you should advocate for it because people will hear you out.” And, she says she learned, “that I’m not so shy as I thought I was. ”

I ask the kids if they think they’ll here back about their complaints about junk in their neighborhood. They think so.

” I’m hoping he might actually contact me before I get tired of waiting and actually do something about it and contact him myself,” Alex says.

That persistence may turn out to be the most important lesson of all. It’s been over a month and no one has contacted Alex or Arlene yet. And the junk is still there. And Prop 29 is currently behind in a preliminary vote count.

Photo: Lillian Mongeau

Photo: Lillian Mongeau

Photo: Lillian Mongeau

Photo: Lillian Mongeau

Photo: Lillian Mongeau

Photo: Lillian Mongeau

Valeria Bautista runs a bike shop at her school in Lawndale, a small city just south of Los Angeles. Students fix donated bikes and sell them or rent them to fellow students. She’s worked there since she made an important discovery in her junior year at Environmental Charter High School: She loves fixing bikes.

“If it’s totally rusted out and you can give it a new life and give it a new story for somebody else to ride it, I feel it’s an amazing feeling,” she says.

The shop got started a few years ago when Matthew Dang, a student at the school, made it his senior year project to encourage alternative transportation. It worked, says the school’s executive director, Alison Diaz.

“There used to be no bikes on campus. And now there’s over 75 a day. That’s a quarter of our population riding bikes to school in an urban area,” Diaz says.

Seniors started riding and fixing bikes, Diaz says, and the younger students followed suit. Now, it’s cool. But Dang and Bautista didn’t figure out how to fix bikes all by themselves.

“Brian is a really awesome teacher,” Bautista says. “I learned everything that I know from Brian. ”

That’s Brian Lindquist the owner of Beach Cities Cycles in Hermosa Beach. He’s donated some money and tools, but he says mostly he’s put time into the in-school bike shop. Lindquist doesn’t run a non-profit and he’d never started a bike shop with a bunch of teenagers from a rough neighborhood before. But he says the project has changed the way he sees his community.

” I definitely get a different perspective on kids as not just being a pain to deal with,” he says. “I can see the generation coming up really does have a grasp on things and can accomplish great things. ”

There’s also a practical aspect to what he’s doing: teaching marketable skills.

“Hey, you’re creating yourself a workforce later on,” he says.” The big stumbling block nowadays of getting into a bike shop is do you have experience? And almost nobody does. It’s a catch-22 thing. If you don’t have experience, you can’t get hired. If you can’t get hired you don’t have experience.”

Bautista has already landed a volunteer gig at a local bicycle cooperative. Her work there inspired her senior project, a these on how such a cooperative in a low-income area attracts commerce and vitality. Bautista says volunteering at such cooperatives gives kids more than just bike-fix-it know-how.

“They’re being given an opportunity by a place like this to gain job skills, to gain organization skills for committees and things like that,” she says.

Principal Jenni Taylor says the high school’s bike shop provides a lot of the same benefits.

” The kids that have taken on ownership of the bike shop and have really just turned into amazing stewards that are excited to help the community,” Taylor says.

The kids’ ability to run a shop hasn’t gone unnoticed by colleges either. Dang, the student who started the bike shop, now attends Brown University.

“They get to tell those stories after they do something awesome to colleges, and the colleges say wow,” Diaz says. “Now, Matt’s been asked by Brown to start that on their campus.”

Bautista says the business skills and resume building are important to her, but they’re really only one part of her passion for bikes.

“The feeling when I’m going downhill on my bike, it’s just a really freeing feeling,” she says. “You feel very empowered. You feel like an individual.”

An Elmhurst Community Prep student leads a conference with her mother. Photo: Laura Robell

By Lillian Mongeau

It has become a default explanation for student failure in low-income communities: Those parents don’t care what their kids are doing in school. Principal Laura Robell thinks that’s ridiculous.

“I’ve never met a parent who doesn’t care about their kid’s learning. All parents care about their kid’s learning,” Robell says.

Robell leads a small public middle school in East Oakland. She says family involvement here is critical. When parents don’t help their students with homework or encourage them to show up on time, kids can get the message that school is not important. And when that happens, schools have an uphill battle to convince kids to engage in their studies.

“Parents are our partners in this work,” she says. “Their role in the ways that students show up at school is hugely important, and so of course parent involvement is a major thing that helps us both raise test scores and have students be more prepared for school, better readers and writers, better math students.”

The school Robell leads is located in one of the poorest, most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. It many neighborhoods with these stats, it’s hard to pull parents in. Early evening Back To School Night’s are scheduled with a nine-to-five job in mind, but parents in working class neighborhoods often work morning or night shifts that don’t come with time off. And many parents in this neighborhood won’t go out with their kids after dark for fear of the gangs and the drug dealers. Despite all that, ninety percent of Elmhurst families visit the school twice a year to discuss their child’s academic progress. Robell says the trick is to let the kids do the talking.
Student Tina Tupou is in eighth grade here and she’s sitting with her mother and sister in a math classroom.

She tells her mother, “We had to make a history book, like a little history flip book for the Missouri Compromise, like we had to write seven questions and then fill it in with our answers.”

This is called a student-led conference and it’s Elmhurst’s answer to Back To School Night.

“This is my math project,” Tina says. “I got a B. We had to graph like – we had to battlefield, like set bombs in the ocean, and then every time enemies try to pass by it’ll explode their boat. Yeah, we had to write a paragraph on how we got our answers.”

When Tina finishes flipping through a folder of projects she’s completed in all of her academic classes, her sister translates what she’s said for Tina’s mother, who only speaks Tongan.

“I’m proud of most of my grades but some grades I wish I didn’t have to show her,” she says after the conference. “I feel embarrassed when I show her. But yeah, I still have to show her. It’s her business too.”

When Elmhurst was founded in 2006, school leaders knew they needed to do a better job making student learning a parent’s business. Back to School Night wasn’t working.

“We were making fun of back to school night,” says founding teacher Christina Villarreal. “Back to school night… it’s a joke.”

Parents must have though Back to School night was a joke too, because not many of them showed up. What was sort of revolutionary about what happened next is that the Elmhurst leaders decided not to blame the absent parents. Instead, they figured it was their job, the school’s job, to come up with a system that worked better. So they started Student-led Conferences and they were a huge hit.

“It just showed like if schools can be willing to be courageous in trying things differently, you might get different results,” Villarreal says.

Villarreal says that Elmhurst school leaders stopped concluding parents don’t care.

“[The] student-led conference directly refutes that claim. It shuts it down, because this exact same population, the same parents,” she says. “They didn’t come to back to school night. But they come to student-lead conferences”

Principal Robell says the conferences have changed the culture of the whole school.

“Families are coming up here not because their kid is in trouble, not because there’s something wrong, but they’re coming up here to celebrate the work that their student has done,” she says.

Tina’s family, for one, is thrilled. Tina’s report card is the best it’s been all year. She has a 3.5 GPA. Her mom says it’s great to see her daughter improve every time. And Tina’s sister, Maue is proud too, though she’s a bit worried about Tina’s math grade.

“What you think, you get B- on your math. What would you do… what would you do, you know, to make it up? To make it better?” Maue says.

Tina replies, “I’ll try to do more extra credit, study more, like study more for my concept checks because the concept checks are worth more of my grade than anything else.”

“They’re all good grades,” Maue says, “but you can move forward to get an A. so our goal for next conference will be 4.0. That’s the goal for us.”

“Yeah, okay,” Tina says.

So Tina writes down her goals for next semester and she writes how she’s going to get there. By going to sleep on time, studying harder, and doing extra credit projects. And her sister and her mom promise to help.

When Monterey Bay area schools fall behind, one of the critical standards they hope to improve is math. They’re not alone, schools across the state are struggling to improve math scores – let alone restore art class. Lillian Mongeau reports that a southern California group is demonstrating how both to reach both goals.

Photo by Lillian Mongeau

Photo by Lillian Mongeau

Photo by Lillian Mongeau

Photo by Lillian Mongeau

Christi Wilkins says art can be one of the most powerful communication tools children have.

Transcript:

WILKINS: I want children to know that they’re seen and they’re heard—what they have inside them is worth expressing. 

She says art classes saved her when she was a struggling student. So Wilkins founded “Dramatic Results” in Long Beach, California to bring more art into the public schools.

WILKINS:  Because of course, past ’79 with Prop 13, so much of Art and Music was cut out. 

Wilkins is referring to Proposition 13, which passed in 1978. The measure limited property tax increases and is blamed for severe budget cuts in California public schools. Wilkins’ program sends instructors to selected classrooms once a week where they teach things like origami, playwriting and basket weaving. But folding a swan or weaving a basket aren’t the only things in the lesson plan. Kids also learn math.

Dramatic Results instructor Samai Khom’s students are several weeks into a basket-weaving project. Khom helps the students connect the project to what they’ve been learning.

KHOM: Alright, so I have this question for you because I was asked this question … how does math connect to baskets? So I see hands up. We are going to give you one minute to brainstorm with your groups …

In the brainstorming group led by Instructor Raquel Lira the students offer  tons of ideas.

STUDENT: You use fractions to do Math in a Basket and it’s addition.

LIRA: Oh, very good. We add up our fractions.

STUDENT: Do you add the perimeter?

LIRA: Yes we do, we add the perimeter. Why did we need to measure our length, width and out height?

STUDENT: Umm, so our basket, it doesn’t get messed up. 

Students say knowing how big the basket was supposed to be in advance, meant they could cut their strips of flat reed to the right length. Today, students are each weaving ten of those strips into kid-sized baskets. The bright dyes—blue, green, red, purple—put one in mind of May Day. Nine-year-old Lia Kim has four blue strips.

KIM: We put four ten because the ten is how much we have to get.

MONGEAU: How do you say that?

KIM: Four tenths.

MONGEAU: So what did you find out by adding these fractions here?

KIM: That we’re almost done with the tenths. 

Jill Baker, an assistant superintendent in Long Beach says learning math concepts in a practical way helps kids cement the ideas in their minds.

BAKER: It gives reason in a way that a child can understand it, for a perimeter to be important to them.  Different than just explaining it or doing it on a piece of paper. 

Of course, students used pencils and paper to do all of their mathematical equations. The difference is that now they can see how solving those equations might pay off in the form of a pretty new basket. Fourth grade teacher Rado Chum says the Dramatic Results  classes reinforce the math he is already teaching.

CHUM: It’s a bonus for me. I know it’s a bonus for the kids too. I wish we had some more of that every year. 

Chum says in addition to the math the kids learn another hard-to-teach skill. Focus. Making a basket is so engaging, he says, that the kids calm down, settle in, and concentrate. And that’s a skill that will help them in every area of academics.

Lillian Mongeau reports that programs Santa Clara County and Los Angeles are providing a year-long science curriculum at little to no cost to districts.

Close to fifty Mountain View fourth graders are tramping through a county park in the hills above their town. They’re chasing after lizards, examining woodpecker holes and throwing twigs into speedy streams. It looks awesomely fun. But it’s supposed to be more than just fun. It’s supposed to be science class. Tour Guides from a non-profit called Environmental Volunteers are leading small groups of kids through the park. John Seyfarth’s group stops to smell the sage.

Seyfarth: Take a good sniff, OK?  So can anybody guess why we call it cologne or cowboy cologne?

This trip is part of a year-long curriculum called “Science by Nature.” It was created by a group of environmental science non-profits. The non-profit leaders say they know the kids are benefiting, but it can be hard to measure the value of a field trip. Bob Power of the Santa Clara Audubon Society:

Power: Part of me doesn’t care whether we quantify it or not. I think we’re doing the right thing and I know our programs are good. On the other hand, it would be great to say: It’s quantifiable. It’s in this report. It’s scientifically valid.

Now, the program’s funders have commissioned an independent study to help them figure out if Science by Nature has quantifiable result on standardized test scores. But test scores aren’t the only thing teachers are watching. Erma Hammond is a second grade teacher in Los Angeles where a similar program is offered. She’s found that her students’ enthusiasm for science is paying off…in writing.

Hammond: Every year second graders have to write a friendly letter.

This year students wrote about what they learned during a field trip to the Desert Dome.

Hammond: The letters were incredible. So, actually that standard has been met by half of the class already with just that one experience. … They’re not just parroting what the teacher said to write, they’re coming up with their own way of saying things.

The teachers in Mountain View weren’t surprised to hear this. When their students wrote thank you notes to Environmental Volunteers they showed the same excitement and attention to detail. To wit:

Daniela Gloucester: Dear John, Thank you so much for telling us all about the wild plants and animals.

Lupita Villanueva Arisa: It was great, but the ones I liked the most was the woodpecker’s holes in the tree and the stream how it sounds.

Kai Jennings: I also liked the creek because we got to throw sticks and try to skip rocks.

Gloucester: I think it’s awesome that the nickname for sage is cowboy cologne.

Jennings: My favorite part was when we climbed the hill, because we got to see a great view when we got to the top.

Brian Gonzalez: PS Thank you for letting us touch the dead owl.

The kids’ letters make it clear that hands-on science learning has an impact. Their excitement about their experiences is even spilling over into other academic subjects. If this fall’s study shows the program can make a difference on high-stakes standardized tests, organizers hope it will convince other districts to adopt similar projects.

Perez: OK here comes the first animal. Oh! A tortoise.

Next the kids meet a snake, then a scorpion, then…

Students: Ah! Wow! Eww!

A cockroach.

Perez: It’s a Madagascar hissing cockroach. It has a large fancy name. Can we say that? Madagascar, Hissing, Cockroach. Just by listening to the name.

Today is the beginning of a 3-day program that will include a field trip and another classroom visit. That used to be all that was on offer, but now Children’s Nature Institute is teaming up with three other non-profits to provide students with an entire year of science programming. They’re calling it “Digging Deeper.” Environmental Educator Melanie Bowerman says having multiple organizations involved means having multiple teaching methods available.

Bowerman: You’re finding the child most receptive to doing art programs or most receptive to visualizing the animals and touching the animals.

This collaborative approach is working well in L.A., but it didn’t start here. The first program in California to launch an initiative like this was in Santa Clara County.

Bob Power: The idea was to provide more than just one program per year per child.

Bob Power of the Santa Clara County Audubon Society.

Power: One field trip and one visit from a special organization and everybody’s happy. Everybody has a good day, but we stepped back at some point and said, “Is that really the most effective way to deliver environmental education?”

They decided it wasn’t. So several non-profits that teach science to kids got together to teach more science to more kids. They explained their model, called “Science by Nature,” to the folks in L.A., who created “Digging Deeper.” Power wants the program to grow.

Power: We’d like to be able tell this story to other school districts, to other environmental organizations who would be interested in what we’re doing.

This year, the Santa Clara collaborative is working with the school district in Mountain View to provide all fourth and fifth graders with a steady diet of natural sciences. Fourth grade teacher Margie Wysocki loves it.

Wysocki: With our standards that are ramping up with No Child Left Behind, with all of those things, it makes it increasingly harder to teach science.

Wysocki says programs like Science by Nature make teaching science easier. Plus, it’s hands on.

Wysocki: With this program, the kids are able to go out, to get their feet and hands wet, touch the worm, be creeped out by the worm and then realize it’s all OK.

Kelly Decker, executive director of Children’s Nature Institute and leader of the L.A. program, says the kind of public-private partnerships her agency is forging with L.A. schools represent educational reform at it’s most innovative.

Decker: Hopefully it will lead to changing the nature of what we think education should look like and could look like in this country. Because we are in a crisis.

Decker thinks part of the solution to that crisis is to have non-profits like hers pick up the slack. Already, she says, her non-profit is having conversations with the district about how to offer the “Digging Deeper” curriculum to more public school kids. The kids, she says, who need this solution the most.

Next week: Lillian Mongeau continues this story with a look at how environmental education projects hope to assess their affects on student achievement.