District Administration - October 2008 - (Page 32)

I Choose to Stay Thomas-EL, board member of America’s Foundation for Chess, addresses a group as World Grandmaster Maurice Ashley watches. he says. “I started teaching special ed through chess.” Vaux had a chess team in the ’70s and ’80s, when chess-playing kids had Bobby Fischer aspirations. But Thomas-EL knew that revamping the program would have greater ramifications for his inner-city students. “There’s a large achievement gap but an even larger exposure gap,” he says. “Two-thirds of the trips inner-city Philadelphia students have taken are within a two- to three-mile radius of here.” Thomas-EL would take them to national championships in faraway places—and win—year after year. Today he sits on the board of America’s Foundation for Chess (AFC), a group that works with superintendents and boards across the country to implement chess programs in their own districts. Thanks to ThomasEL’s passion and a voracious weekend and summertime speaking schedule that takes him to schools across the country, AFC hopes to make programs available to every second- and third-grade student in the United States. “We’re not teaching our students to become chess champions, but to get them to use their brain matter,” he says. Thomas-EL considers his chess programs to be among his crowning achievements as an educator. Positive Programming Russell Byers Charter School is an “Expeditionary Learning” school, the only one in Pennsylvania to offer the hands-on academic program that promotes what 32 October 2008 Thomas-EL (above) with former chess student turned international singer Lauryn Hill. Salome Thomas-EL (left) with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “If your program was working, I wouldn’t have to use mine.” Thomas-EL describes as an “enter to learn, leave to serve” mentality through empowering students to take responsibility for their own education. Twelve-week “learning expeditions” teach kids about places like Africa by having them stage plays about the African-American experience, and about animals through trips to the Philadelphia Zoo. Russell Byers has programs including two-year kindergarten starting at age four, the state’s largest school-based Big Brother/Big Sister program, and a “Reading Olympics” in which students in all grade levels read as many as 20 books in a competition against other schools. Now, Thomas-EL’s five-year plan is to have his district open another building, to accommodate the kids who so badly want in. Kids in School at All Costs During Thomas-EL’s classroom years at Vaux Middle School, 20 of his students were murdered before high school graduation. Since then his tactics for helping keep kids on the straight and narrow have run the gamut. But his work is not without controversy. Some parents don’t like his “program,” which over the years has included trolling his hometown streets to dig out kids from the grocery stores and laundromats where he knows they hang out. If students consider his unannounced visits to their homes not to be a welcome sight, they often are just as disliked by parents, who can feel attacked. When that happens, Thomas-EL turns politely to them and says, “If your program was working, I wouldn’t have to use mine.” His program is indeed working. In the two years that he’s been at Russell Byers, Thomas-EL hasn’t broken up a single fight, in the city with the country’s highest murder rate. “We still have a good number of students who struggle,” he admits. “But it’s a safe environment where students experience joy and rigor every day.” DA Jennifer Chase Esposito is a contributing writer for District Administration. District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - October 2008

District Administration - October 2008
Contents
Editor’s Letter
Letters
News Update
Technology
Facilities & Construction
Inside the Law
District Profile: Englewood (N.J.) School District
Choose to Stay
A Cure for Monolingualism
Virtual Worlds for Educators
DA Web Seminar Leadership Series
School Libraries Renewed
How Well Does This Web Site Work?
New Products
Curriculum Books
Professional Opinion
Calendar of Events
Understanding the Times

District Administration - October 2008