New charter school offers alternative approach to LASD
By Kathleen Acuff, Town Crier Staff Writer
 Joe Hu/Town Crier Bullis Charter School kindergartner Marin Diddams makes a papier-mâché piñata in art class. Bullis combines project-based learning with traditional academic teaching methods. |
Bullis Charter School opened its doors Aug. 23 with an award-winning principal, intent on teaching children to love learning, and a community of parents united in the desire to establish their own school.
The excitement of a Silicon Valley startup animates the adults. The chairman of the board of directors is a venture capitalist, and entrepreneurs, engineers and financial experts troubleshoot the school’s day-to-day problems and help plan its future.
In the staff lounge, second-grade teacher Lauren Hahn said, “This is different from any other teaching environment I’ve been in. Everyone here wants to be here. (The atmosphere) is dynamic and alive.”
First-grade teacher Jonna Monfort-Torres added, “A lot of us moved across country to be here because we believe in the mission and because of the support of this community.”
That mission, in Principal Wanny Hersey’s words, is to develop reflective, independent, collaborative students who love learning.
Learning by doing
As she conducted a visitor through classrooms last week, Hersey said, “As you can see, there are groups of things going on. This is differentiated learning — the students are grouped by level, although they don’t realize it. We have remediation, too. The kids just know they’re engaged in different activities, learning different things.”
In Vicki Foshay’s kindergarten class, children worked on patterns. Some chose the apple portion they liked from a platter, measured it, dipped it in bright blue paint and applied it to paper. Others pasted yellow rectangles in rows. Still other children wrote about a recent walking trip to the Los Altos Fire Station.
Darik Williams’ third-graders were working in learning centers on math, writing and other projects “interrelated with the science curriculum,” the teacher explained.
“They can choose the topics to work on in center, but the teacher can steer them to other topics,” he said. “They are responsible for their own actions, to be reflective thinkers and set personal goals.”
In the multipurpose room, pairs of students in the combination fifth- and sixth-grade class took turns in front of the group, one trying to make the other laugh while the other tried to sit stone-faced. The drama lesson was intended to teach them to think on their feet - to think fast and try something else if what they were doing didn’t work.
“You can see they’re not inhibited whatsoever,” Hersey said.
Out on the hardtop, fourth-graders were shooting hoops. While working on their dunking ability, they were also developing their gross motor skills. Near the picnic tables, boards awaited the weekend and parents who would turn them into the backbones of gardens that students will plant, tend and harvest. Kindergartners and first- and third-graders will make use of them in science units later this year.
Individual goals
Each student’s education is oriented by a set of personal goals, developed through a process that begins with the teacher or a classroom volunteer ascertaining what the child knows already and wants to learn. Teacher and parents then discuss those goals and their own goals for the child and refine the set. Goals will be re-evaluated throughout the year.
Goals can be more than academic. One student may aim to improve social skills, another to become less of a perfectionist or more organized. A student who finds the coursework too easy may be guided toward strategies for coping when the work becomes more difficult.
The long-term goal of the school, Hersey said, is to develop reflective, independent, collaborative students who love learning and can advocate for their own learning, understand, remember and apply what they have learned.
Hersey said she wants education at Bullis to be a process in which students work to their best abilities and raise their expectations to keep growing. “We want to keep them going, keep them excited. We want students to take risks and not become plateaued in any area, including leadership, social skills and emotional development,” she said.
Lisa Stone teaches pre-algebra to her fifth- and sixth-graders.
“They came very well trained in math,” she said, “but when I asked them what a mean was, they told me how to find it. They didn’t tell me why I’d want to find it, they didn’t tell me what it was.”
Her class is mastering “mental math” now, and learning to look at different ways to solve the same problem, she said. Successive lessons build on earlier ones, but they include such a variety of problems that her students haven’t noticed, she said.
Stone said that being able to use materials “besides those one or two things available from the state of California” drew her to the charter school. She said the state does not include any of the “five exemplary math programs” on the U.S. Department of Education’s list. One of those is the College Preparatory Math program, which starts with the two-year pre-algebra course she teaches now.
“You don’t understand how nice math is every day,” she said. “Because they’re learning by doing, they’re engaged. A goal prompts them to go as deep as they possibly can.”
Third-grade teacher Williams added, “Creativity allows them to take ownership of a project.”
Stone said, “It was very painful for them at first. They’d say, ‘Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.’”
Said Williams, “It’s still a work in progress.”
Monfort-Torres said, “It’s process over product.”
“That’s what we really value at Bullis,” said Hahn.
Stone and Williams said, “We’re not teaching anything new. It’s just a different approach.”
Homework
“We want to stay focused on why we give homework. It’s quality, not quantity, so communication is very important. Parents need to understand why something is going on,” she said.
The principal said Bullis kindergartners never have homework. Depending on grade level, older students have nightly reading assignments of 20-30 minutes and from 10 minutes to an hour of other homework, she said. First-graders might be asked to bring in something from nature that has to do with what they are studying. Except for long-term projects, teachers do not assign weekend homework, Hersey said.
Current enrollment analysis
Of the in-district students attending Bullis, 99 formerly attended Covington, nine attended Loyola, eight attended Santa Rita, two attended Springer and one attended Oak.
The 50 out-of-district students commute from eight neighboring districts. Twenty-two Bullis students live in Mountain View-Whisman, six in Cupertino Union, four in Sunnyvale, five in Santa Clara, 10 in Palo Alto and one each in the Redwood City, Union City and Boulder Creek school districts.
