A second life for Nathan Bishop Middle School
http://www.projo.com/news/content/nathan_bishop__open_09-02-09_EPFJ3Q3_v21.36f4f07.html
01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, September 2, 2009
By Linda Borg
Journal Staff Writer
Aja Delgado, 11, gets the hang of opening her locker at Nathan Bishop Middle School in Providence with help from her brother Ryan, her mother and a teacher. Students and parents were invited to a “dry run” Monday. The school opens Wednesday.
The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch
PROVIDENCE — Cameron Wessel is just the sort of student that the refurbished Nathan Bishop Middle School is hoping to attract. Bright, inquisitive and tech-savvy, the sixth-grader chose to leave the highly regarded St. Mary Academy-Bay View to attend a public school that is still very much a work in progress.
The new middle school is nothing short of a grand experiment. Envisioned as a model middle school that will lure East Side families back to the public schools, Nathan Bishop reopens Wednesday amid high expectations from every quarter: students, parents, teachers and school leaders.
Of the entering class of 250 sixth-graders, approximately 40 come from private or parochial schools, including Moses Brown, Providence Country Day and Bay View. Nathan Bishop is split between students who live on the East Side, including Camp Street, and those who come from other neighborhoods.
Less than three years ago, the decaying Nathan Bishop represented everything that was wrong with the city’s struggling middle schools. Student performance was in the tank. Built during the 1920s, the school’s physical layout was ill-suited to support team-teaching, which is considered the gold standard today.
Like so many of the city’s sprawling middle schools, Nathan Bishop was dirty, dark and uninviting. It looked — even smelled — like the past.
After a $35-million renovation that left no surface untouched, Nathan Bishop is truly a Cinderella story. Closed nearly three years ago, the school today welcomes its first class of sixth-graders and a new cadre of teachers handpicked by Michael Lazzareschi, an award-winning former elementary school principal who is determined to dispel the myth that middle schools are the district’s weakest link.
On Monday night, Lazzareschi and his entire staff invited families to tour the school even as crews were putting the finishing touches on the four-story brick building on Elmgrove Avenue.
During that open house, the School Department gave students a “practice school day,” a compressed version of their schedule, from opening lockers to running through a six-period day. Some of the children, who are moving from the one-teacher, one-room realm of elementary school, had that deer-in-the-headlights look.
Lazzareschi tried to calm their fears.
“Don’t worry,” he told them. “It’s new to all of us, even me.”
To one child’s mother, he said, “If you have any problem, feel free to call me.”
Cameron Wessel, the sixth-grader from Bay View, sounded fearless. She chose Nathan Bishop because of its extensive technology and because she was ready for something new:
“When Bishop opened,” she said, “I thought I should take a chance. I like thinking outside the box.”
Students were clearly impressed with the school’s shining new spaces, from the cafeteria with its bouncy chairs and ribbons of pale blue material floating beneath the ceiling, to the two-story media center, with its hand-carved oak trim and Palladian windows to the 350-seat auditorium, with its restored glass ceiling, oak stage and new sound and lighting systems.
The middle school is divided into teams, with two teams of sixth-graders on the first floor, seventh-graders on the second and eighth-graders on the third. Students stay with their team for each of their academic subjects and mix with other students during lunch, art and music.
The notion here is that middle school should feel and operate more like elementary school, with its nurturing atmosphere. In an ideal middle school, teachers build close relationships with their students and collaborate on lesson plans.
In fact, the school’s theme, developed by the principal and faculty, is “I’ll take care of you.”
Because Nathan Bishop is starting fresh, Supt. Tom Brady authorized the principal to hire the school’s teachers. Typically, seniority plays a major role in teacher assignments; not so in Bishop, where teachers had to apply and submit to an extensive interview process.
“I feel like I won the lottery,” said Kerri Krawczyk, a sixth-grade science teacher who taught at Times{+2}, a popular Providence charter school. “The facilities here are unbeatable.”
Krawczyk pointed to her science lab, which has an incubator, water-distiller, refrigerator, even a dishwasher. Each classroom also has a Smart board, a digital blackboard that allows teachers to display multimedia lessons from the Web. Noticeably absent in the new Nathan Bishop are televisions. Once a staple of 20th-century technology, they have been rendered obsolete by the Internet.
During Monday’s open house, Krawczyk welcomed each new wave of visitors and explained what they would need to bring to class: a clean two-liter plastic bottle and a loose-leaf binder with dividers.
“We’ll be looking at weather, storms and climate change,” she said. “You should feel really good about coming to science class. Any questions?”
For parents, one of the biggest draws is that their children can walk to school, a fondly remembered ritual from their own childhoods. Anna Aloshine, a sixth-grader and former Moses Brown student, wanted to go to middle school with her friends and helped organize an e-mail campaign to get them to attend Nathan Bishop. Ten of her buddies are now going to the school.
“I’ve been to a lot of schools,” Anna said. “This is my first public school.”