By all rights, 96th Street Elementary School in Watts shouldn't be busy on a summer morning. School doesn't start until Aug. 18, and the front door is hemmed in by construction fencing to boot. But parents keep popping by the plain brick complex under the roaring flight path of LAX. One mother wants her little girl to attend kindergarten here even though they don't live in Watts. Another mom calls through the fencing, asking if they're doing speech therapy. Inside the office, Tracy Mack, the school's intervention coordinator, is working in cropped sweatpants, her hair casually knotted — it's the middle of her summer vacation.
"This is a school of many veteran teachers who are here because they love it, who believe in our group approach of assessing the students regularly and assessing the success of their own teaching," Mack says. "Imagine that!"
Mack taught at 96th Street for years. Now she helps teachers rapidly identify children who start to lag, then re-teach them whatever is needed. It's done in a highly unusual way: Third-grade teachers constantly meet as a single team, sixth-grade teachers meet as a team, and so on. The collaboration runs deep, inspired by principal Luis Heckmuller, now in his eighth year at the school. For instance, if any first-grade teacher notices at lunch a first-grade child — including one who is not her student — struggling over a first-grade concept, the child is assessed in an oral or written test. Then the first-grade teacher team discusses how the child's teacher should best re-teach the lesson the child has failed to grasp.
[For more of this story, written by Jill Stewart, go to http://www.laweekly.com/news/i...ng-the-rules-5865357]
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