Photo Gallery
Kindgergarten class visits Bridge Haven
A partnership based on the close proximity of Hillcrest School and Bridge Haven Memory Care residence could end if the Lawrence School Board chooses to close that school. Jennifer Wilk’s kindergarten class visits Bridge Haven periodically to cheer residents and share what they have learned.
Watch out, Lawrence. There’s a chance of some wild and wacky weather.
Gingerbread tornadoes, pumpkin pie snow, ice cream fog and pizza lightning are all a possibility, if Jennifer Wilk’s kindergarten class at Hillcrest School has anything to say about it.
And they have a lot to say.
Earlier this month, Wilk’s students walked a few doors down on Hilltop Drive to Bridge Haven Memory Care Residence to interact with the residents.
Bridge Haven, a white house with blue shutters, sits in the middle of a residential neighborhood and looks like any other house. However, the facility provides family-style assisted living for eight senior residents in varying stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The facility prides itself on its core values of home, family and attentive care.
Wilk has been taking her kindergarten or first-grade classes to Bridge Haven for about five years. The children spend 15 minutes to half an hour performing plays, presentations or showing off art projects or other things they’re learning in school. Last month, the children made Valentine’s Day cards and gave them to the residents.
“Every year, we tend to up how many times we go,” Wilk said. “I like to try to go about once a month.”
This month, the children wrote and typed their own scripts and created and decorated their own “television sets” out of cardboard boxes. The children just learned about weather a la “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” Wilk said. The book by Judi Barrett inspired the project.
Peering out from behind their makeshift TV sets, the kindergartners took turns telling their crazy weather forecasts.
“It’s a really cool experience for the kids,” Wilk said.
She said the children are sometimes shy the first time they visit Bridge Haven, but they warm up quickly. She added that not many people, Hillcrest staff included, knew where Bridge Haven was or what the facility did before the partnership began.
Robert Wilson, executive director for Bridge Haven Memory Care Residence and for Bridge Haven Care Cottage, said it’s a cool experience for the residents, too.
“They perk up. They get more into life again,” Wilson said. “You can see the changes in their faces when children come in.”
Robert League, a resident at Bridge Haven, sat and watched as the children performed their weather forecasts. He said he enjoyed when the kindergartners came to Bridge Haven.
“They bring back such wonderful memories from when I was their age,” he said. “I loved school.”
The partnership between Bridge Haven and Hillcrest began when Wilk’s full-time para-educator at the time, Margaret Dixon, knew an assistant who worked at Bridge Haven. Dixon helped get Wilk in touch with Bridge Haven, and she began taking her kindergarten or first-grade classes down the street to interact with the residents.
“Usually after the first time they warm up and get excited to go and show off what they’re learning in class,” Wilk said. “You know, sometimes they ask questions — you know, ‘How come he doesn’t talk?’ or ‘How come he’s in a wheelchair?’ — and they just ask questions about that, and it’s just an opportunity for us to talk to them about how different people need different things.”
Wilk and Wilson agree that the partnership is beneficial to both the Bridge Haven residents and the Hillcrest students.
However, the Lawrence school board is currently looking at the best way to close and consolidate some of Lawrence’s smaller elementary schools, and Hillcrest is on the list.
“It’s tragic because it’s such an important school,” Wilson said. “I feel like it’s one of the more important schools here in Lawrence because it’s an English as a Second Language school, and there’s a lot of diversification there. So we would hate to see it happen.”
Other schools being considered for closure include Cordley, Kennedy, New York, Pinckney and Sunset Hill.
If Hillcrest were to close, the partnership between the Bridge Haven and the school would also end. Wilson said Bridge Haven would reach out to other groups in hopes of saving the relationship between children and the elderly, but it would be more difficult.
“They would have to be bused in,” he said. “So it would have to be a field trip for them.”
Kristin Scheurer, director of marketing at Bridge Haven, agreed and said the partnership between Bridge Haven and Hillcrest creates an important environment for the children and the senior residents.
“There’s something really magical about that connection between the residents and these kindergartners,” Scheurer said.
Comments
kansasplains1 1 year, 1 month ago
This is a great thing to be doing. More schools in Lawrence (and elsewhere in Kansas) should be doing it.
The kindergartners learn a lot and people who have Alzheimer's disease get rejuvenated by it, as well.
kansasplains1 1 year, 1 month ago
By the way, this is a good article, but the headline doesn't reflect what the article is about at all. I am sure that many people never look at the article because of the headline.
And it isn't fair to the writers or the subject matter.
I also especially enjoyed the photographs for this article, as well.
NotreDameHawk 1 year, 1 month ago
So we keep the school that spends $175,000 to bus ESL kids from all over town (money not reimbursed by the state, but coming out of the hire-more-teachers-general-operating-fund) so that 50 kids (yes, that's how many live in the non-gerrymandered portion of the Hillcrest boundaries) can keep their school open because they go talk to people who have Alzheimers? Really? Funny how Wakarusa Valley had this amazing science program, but had to be shut down because it was so small, and most of the kids were bused in...
Oh, and before it starts: NO, the ESL program at Hillcrest is not a model, the district has said the kids there perform no better than at the other cluster and neighborhood sites, NO, "peer learning" is not a part of the program - kids are brought to the school based on their geographic location in Lawrence, not what language they speak and teachers try to keep kids from relying too heavily on other native speakers lest they not make progress learning English and NO Hillcrest does not have an official, formal relationship with any academic programs at KU, and IF it is a draw for KU faculty and grad students then perhaps KU should start ponying up some money for it.
NotreDameHawk 1 year, 1 month ago
I see you don't refute them, and here's why:
Transportation costs? http://www.usd497.org/AboutUs/SchoolBoard/Agenda/2011.12Archives/20111114d/esl.pdf pg 12 Cluster Program Transportation Costs for the 2010-2011 School Year –Cordley: $32,782.80 –Hillcrest: $183,898.61
Kids assigned by language or where they live? Same PDF as above, pg 14 (ESL assignments) Hillcrest: Quail Run, Sunset Hill, New York, Kennedy, Prairie Park, Broken Arrow Cordley: Langston Hughes, Deerfield, Pinckney, Woodlawn
How many kids live in the actual Hillcrest "neighborhhood"? http://www.usd497.org/Consolidation/documents/ESProposal1A36x42.pdf This map shows the reside area figures when everything west of Iowa street is removed. Less than 53. Currently, children immediately south of Sunset Hill elementary school must cross Iowa to come to Hillcrest, while those along the western edge of the current Hillcrest boundary - that stretches almost to Clinton Pkwy and Wakarusa - are closer to Sunflower and Quail Run. Yet all of this gerrymandering only gets them 142 kids - it's still the smallest school in town, by far. THEN they bus 214 ESL kids in.
How well do they perform? http://www.usd497.org/Consolidation/documents/VisionforFuture.pdf pg 7 "According to District Administration, ESL students in the cluster sites do not perform better on achievement tests than students in the neighborhood sites. Similarly, there is no research to suggest a minimum critical mass of ELLs needed to offer successful ESL services."
Is Hillcrest partnered with KU? http://www.soe.ku.edu/pds/partners/ "The KUPDS Alliance currently partners seven schools – four elementary, two middle/junior high schools and one high school – with the KU School of Education." The schools are: Argentine, JC Harmon, New Stanley (KCK); Liberty Memorial, Pinckney (Lawrence); Merriam (Merriam); and Starside (DeSoto)
The facts are out there, but like a lot of Hillcrest supporters, it's easier to pretend otherwise.
NotreDameHawk 1 year, 1 month ago
Got any facts? Money for transportation costs is from exact district info. Yours is "your guess" Why wouldn't the district list exactly how much is offset if it is "half"?
Hillcrest subsidizes other schools? If you have actual proof, I'd love to see it, because that means the district is defrauding the state. Money brought in by extra weighting for ESL kids is spent on the ESL kids wherever they are (and why is it when talk of creating new clusters in different schools happens the Hillcrest supporters complain that the district doesn't have the money to pay for the extra resources that ESL kids need? Which one is it? ESL is a profit center or it is a money drain?) The is no bonus or bump from ESL kids. Any money brought in for them is spent on them.
Not gerrymandered? Have you looked at a map? If New York school was pulling kids from 23rd and Ousdahl, instead of those kids going to Schwegler, would you think that was odd? Where else in town is that going on? The boundaries have changed multiple times in the last 20 years, primarily to stuff more English-speakers in Hillcrest as it became nearly entirely ESL kids. Why was it becoming nearly entirely ESL kids? Because there are only 50 kids inside the actual neighborhood. Wakarusa had about 70 kids who weren't bused in, and that made them too small, so why not Hillcrest?
Peer tutoring and translating will go on wherever the ESL sites are - that's why Cordley and Sunflower and Schwegler, each with a third or less the number of ESL kids - perform equally well academically. The teaching system is designed to work without peer learning happening. Your link to a school site in a far larger district in St Paul proves my point. Their clusters are designed differently ["Developing consistent school-wide guidelines for student placement (according to language proficiency, home language, and/or academic needs)"] Ours are not - the only decision about where you go is what current elementary school boundary you live in.
And yes, the School of Education link is the official list of who KU is working with. If you have proof otherwise of any program at KU working with Hillcrest, you might want to show it.
The truth is there have been a lot of myths built up over the years about Hillcrest in order to deflect from the fact that we're basically running a charter school to serve the vanity of a small group of people. We've seen over the last few years that the clusters can be placed more equitably (and help reach the 20% of families who are eligible but decline services) and that academic performance is maintained.
Hillcrest is a luxury this district can no longer afford. And that's a fact.
NotreDameHawk 1 year, 1 month ago
Of course, you don't address the fact that the dollars for at risk kids come to the based on the number of kids needing services, regardless of whether or not there is a Hillcrest, so I'll thank the kids, not the building.
And you're saying that Hillcrest takes in $600K more than it spends? Let's make sure the folks at the legislature see that. Why are they giving weighting $$$ for ESL kids if Hillcrest has pioneered a formula for doing it on the cheap? Let's ask Dr. Doll if the numbers that the district reports to the state indicate that we are using $$$ tagged for the ESL program on all-day kindergarten somewhere else. But since you conflated "at-risk" with "ESL", even though those dollars are different pots, I can see why you would try to tie that stuff together.
Oh - and it could also be that since the district has to fund district-wide costs like admin overhead that all schools "make a profit" but that wouldn't make only Hillcrest look good, so best not to look too deeply there.
And seriously, enough with the peer learning. It is not part of the program. By your own example, all the ESL kids should be in one large school, lest someone miss out on peer learning because the other kid from Palestine got assigned to Cordley based on where he lives in Lawrence. Got it?
If you are down to insisting that the district continue to waste money on Hillcrest so a few kids might have a chance to be in a class with someone else who speaks their language, then there's no convincing you of anything reasonable. One might think, if peer learning were critical, the district might assign them to sites based on language, rather than hoping that the site will be big enough to maybe have another kid with their language? Instead, the assignment process appears to be more concerned with the efficiency of the bus route used to pick kids up.
And sorry, you can't dodge the transport costs. Those are district numbers from the presentation to the school board this year. $183K just for Hillcrest (and presumably not factored into your "profits" nonsense.)
NotreDameHawk 1 year, 1 month ago
As for the boundaries, I do see kids along University Place who aren't sent to Sunset Hill and instead made to cross Iowa St. to go to Hillcrest, and kids on Quail Pointe Dr., a half mile from Quail Run who are sent 2.25 miles to their "neighborhood" school (Hillcrest) among other things. Please name another situation like it. That is the equivalent of telling someone on West Campus Road that the neighborhood school for them is Kennedy. If not for those weird boundaries, Hillcrest would have…wait for it…50 kids. And yes, boundary changes have occurred in 1991, 1994, 1999 that directly affected Hillcrest, as well as the attendance changes from the opening of the ESL program at Cordley in 2006, and the neighborhood sites opening in 2008.
And that's a nice list of programs from KU that you name checked. They are also district-wide programs. None of them are tied solely to Hillcrest or have any research or educational relationship with Hillcrest - the Applied English Center provides translators, but here's hoping they provide them for the students at Schwegler, Sunflower and Cordley too. www.usd497.org/documents/2012Partners...
As for your attempts to make this racial or throw people under the bus, that is precisely what the Hillcrest 50 are doing. They have thrown educational opportunity for students throughout the district under the bus in order to keep their de facto international charter school operating. Perhaps the kids who live in the neighborhoods with the ESL students would like the chance to get to go to school with them, instead of seeing them shipped off every day to serve as a shield for the Hillcrest 50.
NotreDameHawk 1 year, 1 month ago
Let me guess: you work for Fox News. Your Palin-esque evasion of reality in favor of what you would prefer to be true is a dead giveaway.
Let's start by going back to your very bad math and your incomprehension regarding Kansas school financing. You have added the amount brought in by the students housed in the building and subtracted "staffing" costs. ASince you have not provided any link, I'll be generous and assume you are counting the janitors, cooks etc. ,in addition to the education staff and the floaters, paras, etc., who may not show up on an official staff "list". Yay! $600K profit! All day kindergarten for everybody! (And yes, half point for you - the state doesn't classify ESL as "at-risk" but is does allow money from ESL weighting to be used to fund defined at-risk programs. http://skyways.lib.ks.us/ksleg/KLRD/Publications/2012Briefs/I-1-SchoolFinance.pdf)
But I guess those at-risk kids aren't eating breakfast and lunch, since there is no kitchen at Hillcrest, and the food is brought in from Free State High. Because we are now doing math your way, the cost of buying the food, the extra staff above what Free State actually needs just to make the food that the high school kids consume, the cost of the crew and the truck that drive it to Hillcrest and any other ancillary costs are now on Free State's books, so they've decided to keep everything for themselves. Even with the kids who are paying full price for lunch, there's not nearly enough to offset the costs of the free and reduced lunch kids. Uh-oh! Maybe we should turn over some of that "profit" to feed the kids.
And get them to school! Because if the $183,000 to bus them to school doesn't count against the $600K that Hillcrest makes for the district, I'm certainly not paying it! But, hey, in your magical thinking math that transportation cost doesn't count!
NotreDameHawk 1 year, 1 month ago
So let's remember: the KIDS account for the $1.9 million, not the building. If a tornado dropped out of the sky and swept away Hillcrest, the district would still have the $1.9 million. But if they decided to take advantage of such a situation by not retaining a principal, front office staff, janitors, perhaps a food truck driver and a few teachers, they would save about $250K, plus another $50K a year on the actual operating expenses of the building. That's the real profit.
And again, I hope you realize that you are invalidating another favorite argument of the Hillcrest crowd, which is that putting ESL in other schools would involve too much expense, and the district can't afford the staff it would require. According to you, these kids more than pay for it.
Another favorite of the Hillcrest crowd is that there is something special about Hillcrest and KU, and that it helps attract talent to KU, so it's worth keeping at the expense of the rest of the district for that reason. I listed the actual program that works with individual schools in the district - a program that is not involved with Hillcrest, and you countered with a list of programs that are in every school. I stated that if there is a benefit to KU for attracting students or faculty, KU should be willing to help pay the bill (I'll add that the silence from official KU - not individual faculty with kids who go there or property values that might be affected - about the possible closure of Hillcrest has been revealing.)
I also pointed out that there are no academic benefits to ELL students at Hillcrest compared to the other sites, and pointed out that the (oft-cited by Hillcrest supporters) peer-learning is not only not part of the official teaching curriculum but it is not a factor in the assignment of students to sites. Even if when it occurs, it is random, and as the academic performance shows, not a factor in this district (or the program would be structured to take advantage of it). So why should "peer-learning" be given as a reason to keep Hillcrest open over making the ESL program more accessible? How is that a straw man?
Paul R. Getto 1 year, 1 month ago
-1
tomatogrower 1 year, 1 month ago
Considering there are many different languages spoken, I'm not sure how these students can rely on other native speakers to help them. But so what if they did. If they weren't understanding a science concept, because of a language barrier, but another student can clarify it for them, they will learn science, and figure out the English term for it, instead of getting frustrated and not learning the science at all.
tomatogrower 1 year, 1 month ago
And ps, NDhawk, if you don't like living in a college town with all these non-native speakers, feel free to move.
nativeson 1 year, 1 month ago
I do not understand the objective of this article. This is a great human interest story, and the writer chooses to take an editorial slant on school consolidation. It diminishes the story.
As an immediate family member on an Alheimer's victim, I am disappointed that someone would exploit the good work of this collaboration to make a political point.
Pork_Ribs 1 year, 1 month ago
Status quo for the LJW. The readership they cater to is on the left. The left more often than not votes emotionally and not logically. They usually can't defend their positions with logic so they have to try to make people feel bad or guilty about tough logical decisions. Plus...their 'reporters' can't help but oooze liberal bias. This story is just a good example of both.
Beeper 1 year, 1 month ago
This is two articles with one point: elementary schools have positive effects on neighborhoods in ways that are often unreported.
We pride ourselves in a community of diversity, but frequently ignore the diversity of age, perhaps because we're heavily weighted with students.
Ms. Wilks seems to be a sensitive teacher and is laudable for using trips outside the classroom walls for education -- beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic -- she's immersing children in the real world of health care, aging, communication, and lifestyle. Our City's elementary schools define and serve a neighborhood. They are community centers, playgrounds, and centers of information. They are, or have potential as, health centers, cafeterias, public meeting places, recreational facilities, libraries, and serve community needs for continuing education and public information. The citizens of Lawrence have been ardent, persistent, and constant in their appeal to keep all schools open. Instead of cannibalizing our existing schools, which doesn't solve our economic issues, let's agree to raise more money to maintain, repair, retrofit, and improve our existing schools.
Our fearless, and tireless leaders, have reported that a 3-section school is the most efficient and effective way to administer public education. When the population grows to the point we need it, we can build a new 3-section elementary school.
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