Nine-year-old Bethany Coultas has been chosen to be a one of about 20 A.J. Katzenmaier Academy fifth graders who will mentor incoming third graders.
“I wanted to do it because at home I help my brother,” Bethany said. “He’s going to kindergarten, and I’ve been helping with not just with kindergarten stuff, (but) I’ve been getting flash cards. He’s ahead. I like helping kids and getting a friendly feeling.”
To become an ambassador for the new program, Bethany had to fill out an application, submit and essay and complete an interview with a panel.
The program is a new one for the North Chicago Community Unit School District 187 school, which has been building on a series of initiatives designed to improve behavior, climate and ultimately academic achievement in the third- through fifth-grade building, Principal Mike Grenda said.
The school is set to enter its third year of another program that rewards students, who are called cadets at AJK Academy, for meeting quarterly academic, behavioral and attendance goals by moving them up a ranking system from squires, who can attend ice cream socials and have certain hallway privileges, to knights and dames, who in their first year are treated to a trip to Medieval Times, according to school documents.
The ranking system and other terminology used by school staff gives AJK Academy the feel of a military school, but taps into a set of increasingly common tactics called in education circles Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports, which work by encouraging positive behavior through rewards and provide intervention measures designed to help children from misbehaving, Instructional Specialist Kelly Kaplan said.
“When you hear it, it sounds very military,” she said. “When you see it, it’s more of the coach side of Mr. Grenda, (who was previously the head football coach at North Chicago Community High School). There are military little things that we do with how we stand during our attention times and the way we sit and listen. Those types of things are more military-like, but when you’re hearing the explanations of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, it comes across in coach terms.”
The system seems to be working for AJK Academy, Grenda said, pointing to improvements in student growth, attendance and student discipline.
About 12 percent of the school’s students met or exceeded state standards in reading and math during the spring 2015 state-mandated Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, higher than the 10.7 percent of students who met the same benchmarks districtwide but less than the 33 percent of students who did statewide, according to state data.
The school also reduced the number of major referrals and suspensions it was handing out by 50 percent, according to data that compared the first four months of the 2015-16 school year to the same period the year earlier. The school also averaged an attendance rate of more than 95 percent of that same time period.
The hope is that the new ambassador program will give the fifth-grade ambassadors the chance to learn how to be role models and teach younger students about what they’ve learned in their time at AJK Academy, Grenda said. The third-graders will also hopefully be provided an easier transition to the new school, solving an issue district data has illuminated.
Cayla Williams, 10, is interested to get to know the new students and share some of the things she’s learned, in particular that if you try hard enough, you can accomplish your goals, she said.
When Cayla entered third grade at AJK Academy, she struggled with writing, frequently forgetting to include periods at the end of her sentence. This year, though, a short essay she wrote about her school was featured on its website.
More changes are in the works for the coming school year, including a pilot program designed to take advantage of different teachers’ strengths, Grenda said.
Elementary school teachers are traditionally expected to teach all the core academic subjects, but most teachers and administrators know that different teachers are better in certain areas than others, he said. The pilot program will have teachers teach the subject they’re most proficient in to both their own regular class but also another class led by a different teacher who will teach a different core subject to those students.
Transitions throughout the day that get students moving from one class to another and give them a chance to take a mental break also help students mentally transition, Kaplan said.
Twitter @mekcoleman
