The last neighborhood school
Risley’s status as a neighborhood school makes it unique, but it also results in a lack of diversity. How one program might change that.
On any given morning during the school year, sidewalks near Risley International Academy of Innovation are filled with kids walking to school from their homes in the surrounding Eastside neighborhood.
Some kids are dropped off by their parents, and others take the school’s only bus from Salt Creek.
But most kids who attend Risley live close enough to walk.
“We’re unique because we’re probably the last community (middle) school,” said Risley’s former principal, Amy Hausman, who retired at the end of the school year. “We really are a school based on our community. And so, we’ll have kids here whose parents and grandparents went here.”
Hausman takes great pride in the community surrounding Risley. In May, just before the school year ended, she was three months into her role as principal. The school’s previous principal, Charlotte Macaluso, was asked to take over as the executive director of innovation at Central High School, and as the assistant principal, Hausman was next in line for the job.
Following the chain reaction, the administrators asked Geri Lane, the former Response to Intervention coordinator, to fill in as assistant principal.
“You know, with three months left, you want to keep consistency,” Hausman said.
That hasn’t always been the theme at Risley. After introducing four new academic programs, a new grading system and facing a 50 percent staff turnover, the school has been in relative upheaval over the past few years.
“It’s not for everybody,” Hausman said. “It is very, very hard work that our teachers do.”
“You have to be a very committed teacher to work here, and we have that.”
The amount of programs implemented recently at Risley also makes the school highly accountable in the eyes of outside authorities.
“As an innovation school and a turnaround school, we get evaluated by a lot of external agencies,” Lane said.
The school also recently introduced AVID, which is a college readiness program, Capturing Kids Hearts, a program that helps teachers connect with students, and it became an International Baccalaureate school, which is another agency the school has to answer to.
“We have so many eyes on us,” said Dawn Johnson, coordinator of the IB program.
For the past five years, the school has been either in turnaround or priority improvement status, two of the lowest ratings on the Colorado Department of Education’s evaluation system. The school also has racial isolation and a high poverty rate.
During the 2014–2015 school year, for instance, 85 percent of the school’s population consisted of Hispanic or Latino students and 96 percent qualified for free and reduced lunch, though Hausman estimated that 95 percent could get free lunch.
This isn’t something the educators pay attention to, though.
“It’s not about poverty,” Lane said. Instead, she said, it’s about educating kids, regardless of background.
“To me, it’s about where we are, to be perfectly honest,” Hausman said. “I feel the Eastside is sometimes the forgotten side. And it has so many things to offer and people who care about it and care that their children are getting the same quality education as anybody else. And the community cares.”
Parents and students in other parts of Pueblo might be paying more attention to Risley soon, though, and some of its existing problems, including racial isolation and performance might be addressed further.
With a proposal for a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Magnet Schools Assistance Program in the works, Pueblo City Schools is hoping to turn five more of its schools, including Risley, into magnets.
This would mean that even though neighborhood kids would still be able to attend the middle school, kids from other parts of Pueblo would start attending in higher numbers. This, in turn, would help create more diversity in the school.
Since the grant proposal is still in its early stages, district officials and teachers at Risley didn’t want to comment on what might happen if those schools turned into magnets, but Communications Director Dalton Sprouse said kids who live around Risley would have priority enrollment.
The school’s status as magnet, instead, would direct students from other parts of Pueblo to the school.
On a national basis, educators have been turning to magnet programs to improve performance and desegregate schools since 1970, 16 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
“Magnet schools first developed in the 1970s as a voluntary desegregation tool and an alternative to forced busing,” according to the Magnet Schools Assistance Program.
“The theory behind magnet school is that by drawing from different neighborhoods, magnet schools will attract students with varied backgrounds, thereby creating diverse and engaging learning communities,” it said.
Most schools in Pueblo are different from Risley.
As each school year passes, the sense of community Risley experiences is becoming increasingly rare in other Pueblo schools. After the advent of school choice, kids from all over Pueblo had the option to filter into schools outside of their neighborhoods. While some kids still attend schools close to home, others choose to go elsewhere.
School choice also plays largely into the intention of magnet schools: to create more diversity and, ultimately, improve performance.
And District 60 is no stranger to magnet programs.
In 2007, the district received a $7.2 million grant from MSAP to create magnets.
And when Pueblo City Schools received a $3.4 million grant from MSAP in 2013, it became one of 27 school districts in the nation to receive funds to help create magnet schools, and ultimately try to desegregate schools where racial isolation persisted.
As a result, four schools — Bessemer Academy, Highland Park, Roncalli STEM Academy and Central High School — became magnet schools emphasizing science, technology, engineering and math.
The funds were set up to help “eliminate, reduce or prevent minority group isolation in elementary and secondary schools with substantial proportions of minority students,” a 2013 Department of Education news release said.
“I feel the Eastside is sometimes the forgotten side. And it has so many things to offer and people who care about it and care that their children are getting the same quality education as anybody else.” — Amy Hausman, Risley’s former principal
Of the 16,988 students who were enrolled in District 60 during the 2014–2015 school year, 70 percent were Hispanic or Latino. In the individual schools, those numbers fluctuated from 80 to 90 percent, with small representation from other groups. Magnets hope to change that.
“We’ve had some great success with our magnet programs,” Sprouse said.
Part of becoming a magnet school means adopting a niche — something that would motivate students who live outside of the school’s boundaries to leave their neighborhoods.
The other schools included in the grant proposal are Heroes Pre K-5 Academy, Minnequa Elementary, Bradford Elementary and Park View Elementary. If District 60 got the grant, Bradford and Park View would become IB schools, and Heroes, Minnequa and Risley would incorporate creative sciences and arts into their schools.
For Risley, that would mean adding a fifth program to its list of efforts to turn things around.
But even if the grant doesn’t work out, Risley educators said the school is about to turn around.
“We’ve been a turnaround school for awhile, so we’ve got everything in place now, I feel, we’re right at that precipice to have our scores start going up. We’re seeing small growth and I think we’re just at that place where we’re going to see it.”
And regardless of all the changes it’s experienced lately, the school has created a strong sense of identity. In 2014, when a state review panel was determining whether or not the school should continue as an innovation school, one evaluator made an observation that has stuck with the school ever since.
“And she coined the term that we should have known long before she told us,” Lane said, “It’s the Risley way.”
“The Risley way will stay forever and ever.”
