Helping kids succeed

This is the last in a five-part series on how the local school district is dealing with the No Child Left Behind Act.

Ibrahim Muradian recently found himself in an odd position for a high school math instructor: explaining how to add two numbers together.

The special-needs student he was tutoring had nearly finished a sophisticated problem but stumbled on the final step, which Ibrahim thought would be the easiest. Out came the pencils and blank paper, and the two of them reviewed the most basic part of math.

“We went back and did a long review of addition, and after that he never made those mistakes again,” Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim, 17, is among the seniors participating in Estancia High School’s Tutor Corps, a program in which high-performing students mentor struggling ones. Estancia started the Tutor Corps shortly after it entered Program Improvement, the federal list of schools that have repeatedly failed to score highly enough on standardized tests. The school took other measures as well, including bolstering its after-school programs and even partnering with UC Irvine to train math teachers.

In August, the efforts paid off, as Estancia became one of two schools in Newport-Mesa history — along with Whittier Elementary School — to get to year two of Program Improvement and then fight its way off the list.

“The main thing to realize is that there’s no magic bullet,” said former Estancia Principal Tom Antal, who guided the school through its tough years. “It’s a concerted effort by everyone at the school doing different things, because you want to reach as many students as possible.”

The Newport-Mesa school board will vote tonight on changes to make at three schools — Pomona Elementary School, Wilson Elementary School and TeWinkle Middle School — that are on year three of Program Improvement. When schools reach the third year, they must take corrective action or face further sanctions. To get off the list, schools must meet federal requirements two years in a row.

Both Estancia and Whittier pulled off that feat last year — and with the government set to raise the bar in 2008, Newport-Mesa is hoping they won’t be the last schools to do it. This year, No Child Left Behind requires 24.4% of students to score as proficient in English and 26.5% in math. Starting in the fall, the numbers will leap to 35.2% and 37%, respectively.

By that standard, nearly all of Newport-Mesa’s Title I schools — those targeted by Program Improvement due to high numbers of low-income students — will soon face sanctions if they don’t vastly improve their performance from the last few years. Public hearings, such as the ones the district recently held on its year-three schools, could turn into annual rituals.

For the time being, though, Newport-Mesa has a pair of notable success stories. No one at Whittier or Estancia can say for sure why students scored better the last two years, but both schools took action to focus on the standards and provided extra support where they could.

At Estancia, administrators assigned students who had struggled before on tests to after-school tutoring. Teachers from different departments created common writing assessments. To further brush up verbal skills, Antal said, science teachers had students write lab reports in essay form.

And at Whittier, where 97% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, admin- istrators added after-school tutoring and instated the Reading First program to train teachers in the state English standards. Under Reading First, students take assessment tests every four to six weeks, while teachers hold grade-level meetings to compare progress.

Teacher Julie Wheeler said that after Whittier entered year two of Program Improvement, she did fewer art and social science projects and allotted more time to English and math. Even with the school off the list, she’s continued stressing those subjects to prepare kids for the benchmarks to come.

There are moments, though, when Wheeler is reminded that standards aren’t everything.

“When I say we’re going to do art today,” she noted, “they literally clap and cheer.”