Wachovia grant boosts UF-led school network

October 7, 2004

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Fourteen high-poverty elementary schools in Jacksonville, Miami-Dade County and Gainesville are forming a network and partnering with the University of Florida in a no-holds-barred effort to turn around their low student achievement and high teacher turnover.

The new Florida Flagship Schools network is forming under the auspices of the Lastinger Center for Learning at the UF College of Education. The center was created in 2002 to mobilize the expertise and resources of UF’s interdisciplinary research community and find answers for one of today’s major social concerns — improving the quality of teaching and learning in under-resourced schools.

The Lastinger Center for Learning recently received a major boost in the form of a $250,000 grant from the Wachovia Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Wachovia Corp., one of the nation’s largest financial services providers. The UF center was one of 18 grant recipients and one of only four to receive the maximum amount offered. The Wachovia Teachers and Teaching Initiative supports organizations that improve teacher recruitment, development, support and retention with the ultimate goal of increasing student achievement. Grant applications are accepted by invitation only.

With the Wachovia grant, the UF Lastinger Center is adding six more schools from the Miami-Dade school district to the original eight-member network of Florida Flagship Schools.

The six new South Florida schools are Maya Angelou Elementary, Dr. W.A. Chapman Elementary, Paul L. Dunbar Elementary, Kelsey L Pharr Elementary, Lenora B. Smith Elementary and West Homestead. Together, they add 120 new teachers, six new principals and 1,600 new students to the network.

They join four original partner schools in Gainesville — M.K. Rawlings Elementary, Duval Elementary, Joseph A. Williams Elementary and Prairie View Academy; two in Jacksonville — Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary and Long Branch Elementary; and two in South Florida — Florida City Elementary and Laura C. Saunders Elementary in Homestead.

“All of our Florida Flagship Schools have received D or F school grades at some point over the previous five years. Many are making tremendous gains but, paradoxically, faculty and administrators fear that improvement means the removal of state resources and financial support available to low performing schools. These conditions make teacher retention an ongoing challenge,” said Donald Pemberton, director of the UF Lastinger Center for Learning. “Our goal is to improve the educational opportunities and ensure the success of children in underserved communities, particularly African-American, Hispanic, Haitian Creole and immigrant students.”

Nearly 7,400 students attend the network’s 14 schools, with more than 92 percent enrolled in the free-and-reduced-lunch program for children in low-income families. All of the schools are in urban, high-poverty areas. More than three-fourths of the pupils are African Ameican or African Caribbean, 12 percent are Hispanic and about 5 percent are white.

A team of 11 UF education professors is leading the Florida Flagship Schools venture in collaboration with 13 principals and 300 teachers from participating schools. The professors actually embed themselves in the classrooms at participating schools for first-hand observation and demonstration of experimental teaching methods.

Other Flagship School participants include administrators from the three involved school districts, state and national government agencies, P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School, which is the UF College of Education’s laboratory school in Gainesville, and faculty from other UF units, including the College of Business Administration. Teachers and principals from Flagship schools each have their own networking groups — the Florida Teacher Fellowship and the Florida Academy of Principals — that meet regularly throughout the year.

Randi Garlitz, in her sixth year as a reading teacher at Williams Elementary School in Gainesville, said the Flagship Schools network was a “big contributing factor” in helping her school earn its first-ever B last year.

“The Flagship Schools fellowship is unlike any traditional professional development program,” Garlitz said. “Instead of lectures that go in one ear and out the other, the hands-on input we receive is phenomenal. They teach us to think outside the box and arm us with new teaching practices that we can immediately apply in our classrooms.”

UF’s Lastinger Center serves as a central clearinghouse, identifying and sharing the most effective, research-driven teaching strategies and innovations, coordinating joint research projects and fostering the exchange of ideas and experiences among teachers, principals and other school officials in the network. The center sponsors or coordinates several professional development seminars, workshops and summer institute programs, facilitates after-school teacher fellowship meetings, produces video demonstrations of model lessons or teaching practices, publishes a network newsletter and hosts a website for the network schools.

“Rather than face the dilemmas of an under-resourced school alone, educators in the Florida Flagship Schools network will work together to address them. They can learn with and from each other,” Pemberton said.

Pemberton aims to make sure those best practices find their way into classrooms throughout Florida.

“We seek to create a high-impact, research-based model for improving public education. We will share the practices that improve student achievement and teacher retention the most with high-poverty elementary schools throughout Florida and the nation,” Pemberton said.