Water musings at YSHS, McKinney

YSHS teacher Elizabeth Lutz-Hackett, left, Vice Principal Vickie Hitchcock, and Principal John Gudgel are preparing for the new school year and the new water immersion program.

By Virgil Hervey

When Yellow Springs High School and McKinney School students return to school on Wednesday, Aug. 29, they will be faced with the prospect of “water immersion.” The brainchild of YSHS English teacher Elizabeth Lutz-Hackett and McKinney language arts teacher Aurelia Blake, the water immersion initiative is a new interdiscipliary project, an examination of water as it relates to all courses.

“Water is a natural as a thematic unit for the whole school,” Principal John Gudgel said in a recent interview.

The plan, according to Lutz-Hackett, is for students to explore the topic of water from a global perspective to a local one, covering such wide-ranging issues as how so many women around the world are mired in poverty because they spend 60 percent of their day carrying water to their homes; how Las Vegas is running out of water and related Colorado River issues; and how to protect the Jacoby Creek watershed. The kids will also be encouraged to learn what they can do in their own homes to go green with the water supply and hopefully influence their families, she said.

“What we do at home affects the rest of the world,” she said. “If the kids understand global issues, they will know how to make choices in their own lives.”

The water immersion project will extend to exploring good business practices and what can be done regarding water conservation at the school, as well as studying the Yellow Springs water cycle “from watershed to waste treatment,” Lutz-Hackett said. To that end she has already consulted with the Yellow Springs Environmental Commission.

She also hopes the halls of the school will be filled with artwork, poetry and prose about water.

According to Gudgel, water will just be the first of many topics in what is to be an annual thematic exploration across the curriculum.

According to Lutz-Hackett, the water project came about because teachers were looking for something to fill the last two weeks of the second quarter of the school year. Traditionally, final exams for the grading period are given before the winter break, but the third quarter does not actually start for another two weeks after the kids return. So she came up with the idea of using the left-over time for immersion in interdisciplinary study, and Blake proposed the focus on water.

Eventually, Lutz-Hackett and Blake were joined by teachers Vickie Hitchcock, Sara Lowe, Iyabo Eguaroje and John Day on a committee that further developed the idea for the board of education’s Action Plan Committee and prepared a PowerPoint presentation for the entire staff.

The students will become immersed in the topic by discussing it in all their classes and spending 1 hour blocks on individualized study in the afternoons for two weeks in January. However, many of them and their teachers will start preparations for their own specific involvement long before that. Water samples may need to be taken from local streams before they freeze over, and documentaries and senior projects on the topic may need to be started earlier.

In addition to studying water’s relationship to the subject matter of each course, students will be required to work on an individual project involving water. If a student doesn’t choose a project, one will be chosen for him, Gudgel said.

At the end of the two-week immersion in January, there will be a water celebration, Lutz-Hackett said. The community will be invited to the event, slated for the new Antioch McGregor building, where the kids will get to show off what they have been doing.

Lutz-Hackett is also a key player in the the schools’ new reading literacy initiative, which was prompted by her awareness of the nationwide decline in students’ reading ability. Students who do not fully comprehend what they are reading are set up for failure, she believes, and she doesn’t want anyone to fall behind because of difficulty reading, not only in English, but in all courses.

The reading literacy program meets many needs, Gudgel believes.

“Reading phobia masks the ability to read and comprehend,” he said. “Standardized tests are all essentially a test of a student’s reading comprehension.”

Once again the school is reaching across curriculum lines by involving teachers from all disciplines in the development of strategies. Noting that Mills Lawn School will focus on a reading initiative of its own this year, Lutz-Hackett said teachers should not stop teaching students how to read when they get to high school.

Implementation of the reading literacy initiative will involve a team of teachers from all disciplines who will attend monthly workshops at the Greene County Educational Center and then incorporate the strategies that they develop into their own courses. Small libraries will be set up in the classrooms, and time will be set aside for reading, not only for the students, but for the teachers and staff as well.

On Fridays, students will use English class time to read for fun and will be required to read two independent books per quarter, writing book reviews for posting on the Internet. They will also be encouraged to participate in the book club at the library.

A Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) program is planned during which time will be set aside weekly or bi-weekly for students, teachers and staff to read silently, according to Gudgel, who said he will join in the reading as well. He will also develop a library for his office, so that students who are sent there for disciplinary reasons will have something to read while they are waiting to go back to class.

The new school year will see a continuation of last year’s later start time for classes, so teachers have time for planning and collaboration before school. The teachers like the later start time, Gudgel said, adding that the water immersion and reading literacy initiatives arose out of their new planning and collaboration time.

Student numbers in the YSHS building are “significantly up” this year, he said. “There is a bubble going through grades 9–12.”

According to Gudgel, there are over 70 students in ninth grade and about 70 sophomores, while the numbers for the junior and senior classes are in the 60s. In recent years, high school classes have averaged about 50 students.

Gudgel expects larger class sizes of about 25–26 students in basic classes, compared to previous classes in the upper teens. In an attempt to deal with the issue, Gudgel said, no new open enrollment students were accepted for the ninth grade this year. The silver lining in the increased enrollment is a noticeable increase in co-curricular activities, he said.

Last year, the driveway in front of the high school was closed mornings for the safety of students waiting to be admitted to the building, and parents were advised not to drop their children off there. As to whether parents should drop off students at the horseshoe in the mornings this year, Gudgel said he is still weighing the best option.

Contact: vhervey@ysnews.com