The school was honored by Reader’s Digest magazine for its success in raising test scores and boosting student reading levels.


May 30, 2005
By Beverly A. Carroll, Staff Writer
Chattanooga Times Free Press

East Side Elementary School principal Emily Baker and her staff were proud to be noted by Reader’s Digest as one of two elementary schools reporting success proving "even the hardest-to-reach student can be inspired to learn."

"It does two things," Ms. Baker said of the article that featured her school and a charter high school in Albuquerque, N.M.

"It recognizes a school that worked very hard to raise test scores, and more importantly it shows that urban schools can change to meet the needs of the kids."

The change at East Side has its roots in an initiative launched five years ago and aimed specifically at inner-city schools. Corinne Allen, the director of the Benwood Foundation, a local private funding group, knew the research said if children are reading at or above grade level by the third grade, their chances of graduating from high school are much greater than those who are behind. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, children not reading at or above grade level by the third grade reach the ninth grade still as poor readers. Those children are eight times more likely to drop out of school, according to the NCES, and high school dropouts are likely to earn up to 35 percent less than graduates over their lifetimes.

Ms. Allen wanted to help the school district develop a program that could focus on reading in inner-city schools where overall reading scores were poor. Benwood partnered with the Public Education Foundation of Chattanooga, which administered the grant and provided an additional $2 million for the program.

One of the key pieces has been teacher training, Ms. Baker said. The grant money paid for extra training for teachers as well as for hiring extra instructors to provide one-on-one or small group reading instruction, she said.

That extra help is critical for schools such as East Side, where there are high levels of poverty and more and more students for whom English is a second language.

East Side is an "English Language Learner" center, which means it draws students from nine school zones, Ms. Baker said.

"Some people worried that those students will bring our test scores down," Ms. Baker said. "But I love them. And we will just have to work to see that they don’t (affect test scores)."

Last year, pupils at Benwood Schools reported higher academic gains in reading on state standardized tests than those at the top 10 percent of all elementary schools in Tennessee, school records showed. Gains are measured by how much students learn in one year. While the Benwood Schools scores are still considered failing on the state scale, the gains made by students are considered improvement. Hardy Elementary, for example, made enough progress to be removed from academic probation last year. East Side’s students outgained the state average by about 30 percent last year.

The Benwood program is part of a districtwide effort to address the needs of all students, Ms. Baker said. Grant-funded reform programs are under way in high schools and middle schools.

"(The Reader’s Digest article) is good recognition for the district and the many good things that are going on," she said. "It’s good to show that the district is trying to meet the needs of all children."

Board of Education member Everett Fairchild said the Benwood Initiative shows what can be achieved with enough resources used in the right way. The Benwood schools are Title I schools, which means more than 50 percent of their students qualify for the federal free- and reduced-price lunch program. "We’ve made progress in those schools," Mr. Fairchild told a group of county commissioners. "But it takes resources."

Staff Photo by Juliette Coughlin. Marisol Jimenez, right, one of two full-time English-as-a-second-language teachers at East Side Elementary School, works with kindergartener Ronaldo Miranda on recognizing the difference between a penny, a nickel, a dime and a quarter.