Performance School in a Turnaround District
The Pueblo School for Arts and Sciences has the same demographics as most turnaround schools in District 60. So how does it maintain its status as a performance school?
On the surface, the Pueblo School for Arts and Sciences seems vastly different from other schools in District 60.
A thriving charter school in a turnaround district, PSAS has its own school board and director, more access to the public funds it receives and can do administrative tasks such as hiring outside maintenance crews on its own.
The school has 240 kids on its waiting list hoping to “choice” in, and each parent does 18 hours of volunteer work per year at the school.
And when it comes to academics, the school does just what its name suggests by focusing on the arts and sciences for its kindergarten through eighth grade students. According to the Colorado Department of Education, the school has been a performance school since 2012, and for two years before that, it was part of a performance plan.
But in terms of demographics, the school’s student makeup isn’t much different from other schools in the district.
“I have over 65 percent free and reduced lunch students here,” said PSAS director Brian Repola. “My demographics are the same as Haaff (Elementary School) or Roncalli (STEM Academy). It’s not any different.”
For the 2014–2015 school year, the free and reduced lunch statistics were higher than previous years at Haaff Elementary School, with 74 percent of the student population qualifying for the program, according to the CDE. But from 2010 to 2014, Haaff’s statistics were in line with PSAS, with statistics ranging from 56 to 66 percent.
At Roncalli, 84 percent of the school’s students qualified in the 2014–2015 school year and in previous years, the statistics ranged from 74 to 81 percent.
When it comes to accepting kids into the school, PSAS does so on a first-come-first-serve basis, free of any type of screening process. The biggest difference in PSAS’s student makeup is that it accepts elementary and middle school students.
So how does PSAS do it? With nearly the same makeup of kids as other District 60 schools, PSAS’s differences may have a major role in the school’s status as a performance school.
“We’re a performance school that’s in a turnaround district,” Repola said.
When the CDE evaluates schools, it uses performance indicators such as academic achievement, academic growth and postsecondary or workforce readiness to determine the accountability ranking schools should receive. State testing and teacher evaluations serve as major measurements of these accountability standards.
So when a school meets or exceeds these expectations, it becomes a performance school.
As a charter school, the school has a high degree of independence from Pueblo City Schools.
And charter schools are supposed to be independent. In 1992, Colorado passed the Charter Schools Act, making it possible for more schools like PSAS to open. The school opened its doors 21 years ago in the building that was, from the 1950s to the 1980s, Washington Elementary School.
PSAS’s independence is exemplified, for one, in the teaching style it presents.
Outside of the school’s emphasis on the arts and sciences, it follows education values known as the Paideia Principles. Under these 12 values, Repola said, the school prepares students for adulthood.
In the classroom, Repola said the school focuses on three types of teaching: didactic, intellectual coaching and Socratic seminar.
PSAS spends only 15 to 20 percent of its time on didactic teaching, which is a more traditional lecture format that takes place in classrooms; 50 to 55 percent of the time on intellectual coaching, a format that allows kids to work more closely with peers and teachers; and the rest of the time on Socratic seminar, which is a larger group conversation among different age groups.
“It teaches kids to have adult conversations,” Repola said.
The school’s emphasis on the arts and sciences is also integrated considerably into the curriculum.
A recent trend in education has been to integrate the arts into STEM programs, which focus on science, technology, engineering and math. This combination ultimately creates “STEAM” programs.
But since it opened, before the STEAM school trend, PSAS has followed those areas of emphasis.
“We were a STEAM school before it was even cool to be a STEAM school,” Repola said.
PSAS also involves itself in multiple academic competitions. Every other year, the school either competes in History Day competitions or a science fair.
At school, students attend two humanities classes per day and every other year, students loop with their teachers. This means students have the same teacher for first and second grade, third and fourth grade and fifth and sixth grade before transitioning into seventh and eighth grade.
Perhaps the most significant factor in the school’s independence, though, is its separate school board, which is made up of parents and community members.
“I’m the director,” Repola said, which “is kind of like a mini superintendent. But I’m also still the principal.”
“We do have an assistant principal who does teacher evaluations and discipline and a counselor,” he said.
A lot of this independence means PSAS gets more access to resources than other schools in the district.
Pueblo City Schools, for instance, has been looking into making structural improvements to its more closely-managed buildings, which are, on average, 56 years old. When those schools need improvements, they are required to go through committees and the school board for approval.
But since PSAS is a charter school, it can make improvements to its building anytime it needs to, even though the school may be in better shape than other buildings in the district.
In the past five years, Repola said the school has put $500,000 toward building improvements, which “range from air conditioning to bathroom remodeling to upgraded electricity.”
“It’s the same money that every school gets,” Repola said. “I get about 97 cents out of every dollar because they (the district) take about 3 percent for administration costs, so I don’t get the full amount of money.”
“But here’s the difference: With other schools, those schools get their money, but they have to give their money for overall district things,” he said.
So, while other District 60 schools have to contribute funds to the district and go through the school board for improvements, PSAS can act more independently here, too.
“I don’t have to contribute to the district. We take care of our own accounting, HR stuff, all those things,” Repola said. “So, that allows us to put more money into the teachers’ hands and into the classrooms.”
PSAS also has more access to resources such as computer labs and after school programs.
During the state-mandated PARCC test, which is administered over the computer, PSAS can test three grade levels at a time, “whereas most schools are lucky if they can test one or two,” Repola said.
Also, of the 400 students eligible to participate in after-school programs at PSAS, 300 do, free of charge.
In spite of all of the independence PSAS has, though, it still belongs to District 60. Repola said Pueblo City Schools’ status as a turnaround district doesn’t impact the school very much.
“If we had a high school, it would,” he said, “but since we don’t have a high school, it doesn’t really.”
Like other schools in the district, Pueblo City Schools still evaluates the school, owns the building it occupies and takes some funding for administrative costs.
“We have a good relationship,” Repola said, adding that the school has a liaison between itself and the district.
In some other venues, academic results for PSAS are mixed when it comes to competing against other local specialty schools. Colorado School Grades, an online tool set up by coalition of 18 non-profit community organizations to measure school performance, rates PSAS’s elementary school and middle school with a “C” grade. That puts PSAS in the middle of the pack both in Pueblo and Colorado.
Competing schools, such as the middle schools at Goodnight, Corwin International and Cesar Chavez Academy, have “B”, “C+” and “C” grades respectively.
If anything, the school gives parents more options in terms of school choice.
After the Charter Schools Act was passed, parents also had more options in terms of school choice statewide. When it was time to open PSAS, Repola said parents responded immediately to the chance for school choice.
“The night they opened up the wait list, they say people were sitting in the parking lot at the Arts Center at midnight and that they filled up the school in like two hours,” Repola said. “That’s how many people wanted to be part of it.”
PSAS was only the third charter school in the state to open. The first was District 70’s Connect Charter School.
When Pueblo City Schools opened PSAS, it did so with help from the University of Southern Colorado, which today is Colorado State University-Pueblo.
Today, the school is still in high demand. Repola said the school has 240 kids on its waiting list, which is the only way students can sign up.
Most of the school’s students, 70 percent, come from around the school’s neighborhood, Repola said, which is located on Jones Avenue near Pueblo’s Minnequa Lake area. PSAS currently has 450 students enrolled, with 50 students in each of the school’s grade levels, kindergarten through eighth grade.
“We do get kids from all over the place, but still the majority of these kids are on these streets that are around this school,” he said, which creates a demographic unlike the district’s magnet schools.
Students who use open enrollment to choice into magnet schools, conversely, enter a lottery that directs kids from all over town to those schools to create more diversity.
Both school formats, regardless of their differences, are intended to give parents more choices.
“We like to feel that we give folks in Pueblo a choice when it comes to a program that we do,” Repola said.
