Ochoa Elementary School had a near-death experience two years ago.
Knocked as being under-enrolled with a ho-hum academic record, it was one of four schools slated for closure in the Tucson Unified School District.
But parents, alumni and key South Tucson figures rocked several rallies to save the school, and the district Governing Board abandoned the plan.
Still, Principal Heidi Aranda knew the school, with about 220 students, would need its leaders to do something dramatic to ensure its long-term survival.
Now, weeks into the start of the school year, it's not only back from the brink, but it's at the forefront of TUSD's ambitious plan to challenge its schools to define how they're different, what it's like to learn there and why children β and parents β should choose them above all others.
Certainly several schools have started work on finding a niche that presumably will lure students from across the district, under Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen's First Choice Schools program. Some are looking at increasing arts programs, starting International Baccalaureate studies or stepping up their science, technology or math offerings.
But Ochoa, which sits on the northern dividing line between South Tucson and the city of Tucson, is the farthest along in its shift, embracing an Italian educational model that focuses on exploratory learning and inviting environments.
The school had been using a Reggio Emilia approach at its preschool since 2005. It's an approach that believes children have a hundred languages β and that the traditional school model steals 99 of them.
With plans to take the model through fifth grade within four years, this year's kindergartners are the first ones to be taught under what amounts to a quiet revolution, given that the school had for three years been using such a structured reading program that it literally dictated what, when and how teachers taught on a daily basis.
"Many people would pay to have this kind of education," Aranda said, noting that it's an approach private schools might take. "But what makes this particularly unique is that we're not only a public school, but we're in an area with high poverty. We want to offer this because we feel this is exactly what our families deserve and are entitled to."
The most visible difference is the classroom environment itself, called the "third teacher."
The screaming colors and cold steel so often found in primary-grade classrooms are replaced with soft cream and white, and natural wood.
Delicate incandescent beams come from table lamps, not the harsher fluorescent tubes overhead β which are usually turned off unless a teacher wants to get everyone's attention.
Students don't sit in formal lines of desks, but instead curl up in white couches and cozy armchairs. Hard lines give way to curving nooks, designed to make the room welcoming, warm and comfortable. The preschool room even has a faux fireplace, complete with the crackling sound of fire and soft, red light.
Commercial posters with can-do, stock sayings that so often adorn classrooms are absent. Instead, student work and observations are the focal point.
And that's just the classrooms. The school has a special studio, too, designed to help students with multiple modes of expression. Shelves are lined with jars corralling colorful items with varied textures, such as seeds, pods, old movie tickets, leaves and corks. There are trays of buttons, crayons, paint, pencils. Music plays in the background. Mobiles glint in beams of soft light.
"Too often, you could walk into a classroom and you don't know who the students are or where you are in the country," said Pauline Baker, the school's studio teacher. "Classrooms are too often ugly and dirty, with lights making distracting buzzing sounds."
Teachers say that children in these classes see that their work is valued, and their words are on the wall for others to see.
Still, it would be a mistake to put too much stock in the aesthetic differences, preschool teacher Paula McPheeters said.
"There's a misconception that it's all about environment and white walls. People think it's this touchy-feely stuff, but it isn't. It's profound, it's very academic, and it's very deep," she said.
Instead of seeing kids as empty vessels waiting to be filled, the method sees students as authors of their own growth.
To get an idea of how that works, the teachers in Reggio Emilia, Italy, famously supported a long-term project in which children created an amusement park for birds. Locally, Ochoa kindergarten teacher Brandi Ruiz heard her students commenting about the dust they saw floating in a sunbeam coming through the window. Ruiz encouraged them to explore it: bat at it, shake a tissue, see where it settled. She's not sure where it will lead β teachers are still feeling their way β but she's trying to build around student observations.
In another example, preschool teacher McPheeters last year heard students talking at lunch about how some kids have little to eat. She asked how to address it. The students decided to hold a food drive. That led to a discussion of nutrition, which in turn led to a discussion of how expensive it is to eat well, given the price of fresh fruits and vegetables. That led to a community garden being planted in the back of the school, tended by families that take turns every week.
All because a teacher didn't nod sympathetically at a child and move on.
The district had little money to help in the transition, which is why Principal Aranda jokes that she dreams of Ikea gift certificates. The district was able to use some federal funding to send a group of teachers to visit a Reggio charter school in Portland, Ore., but essentially Fagen credited the teachers with coming up with creative ways to get it done with few resources.
When money comes in, the rugs will be replaced, but for now, the colorful A-B-C rugs were flipped over, showing their cream-colored underbellies.
The kindergarten teachers came in during the summer and on weekends to design their classrooms.
Teachers kicked in money to buy paint and to hire a painter for those creamy white walls.
Aranda and her teachers cruised secondhand stores during the summers, picking up cheap baskets and furnishings.
And that's before school ever started. Since then, teachers have been using voice recorders to document conversations between children. They're used as fodder at weekly staff development meetings.
Because parents are such a key to the program's success, the kindergarten teachers have visited the home of each student's family. And because staffers are feeling their way through a model that carries no recipe, Aranda has spent hours just talking about it. One day last week, some teachers looked at Aranda, and they all realized it was 7:20 p.m. and they were still there. Aranda jokes that she's thinking about getting a roll-out cot.
"It has been a lot of work. But it's the kind of work that makes you feel good, because it's worth doing and because are families are worth it."
DID YOU KNOW
During the 2008 school year, TUSD officials targeted four schools for closure as Governing Board members sought ways to stave off a budget shortfall.
Wrightstown Elementary School, on the east side; Ochoa Elementary School, south of downtown; and Rogers and Corbett elementary schools, both in midtown, were on the list. Wrightstown was the only school that actually came up for a vote before the Governing Board, though.
It eked by with a 3-2 vote, with board member Bruce Burke joining with then-board President Alex Rodriguez to support closures in an effort to "right-size" TUSD as enrollment continues to drop.
