New Tennessee Commissioner of Education Candice McQueen toured three Hamilton County schools Friday but not the ones you might expect.
She did not visit Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, the city's first and continuously successful magnet school, not Signal Mountain Middle/High, a high-performing school in the district, nor one of the new schools currently under construction.
No, she went to three schools -- Brainerd High, Dalewood Middle and Woodmore Elementary -- which have struggled mightily but ones which officials say are on the way up. Since that's the direction we want all schools to go, the visit may have given her hope the educational progress the state has made in the last several years will continue.
"We know we're behind," Le Andrea Ware, iZone director for Hamilton County Schools, said of the schools McQueen toured, "so we have to be ambitious to attain those [improvement] goals. We have to run faster and run harder."
Fifty years ago, Brainerd High School was where parents wanted their children to be. The Brainerd community, the prime suburban growth area in Chattanooga and the city's prime retail hub outside of downtown, was teeming.
Friday night football games were community events, and athletics took no back seat to academics. A board in the school's front hallway listed the names of the school's National Merit Semifinalists, the number of which led area schools for several years.
Today, the school is on the state's priority list, which identifies those in the bottom 5 percent of TCAP scores across the state. Numbers that school officials acknowledge but maintain don't tell the whole story indicate the school had no students in the most recent academic year prepared to succeed in college in all four ACT subject areas of English, math, reading and science.
But Ware said a 2012 school improvement grant has made a difference at all three schools, especially with funding to recruit top teachers and administrators, strengthen them and retain them.
"Any way we can provide stability for our children" is important, she said.
Students at iZone schools attend an extra 45 minutes Monday through Thursday, Ware said, allowing for learning gaps to be identified, for teachers to intervene in small-group settings to help close the gaps and to provide enrichment opportunities.
All students in the iZone schools, she said, also have individualized learning plans to maximize their performance. And students have tablet computers which allow them to continue their learning at home.
Specifically at Brainerd High, McQueen likely would have seen students in the BHS Widening Academic Achievement for Youth program, where students "with very unique circumstances" work together "to get back on the learning path." She also might have seen volunteers from more than 30 community partners working alongside the staff or students engaging in the Senior Shake program that helps give them confidence, advocate for themselves and build their social skills.
Dalewood, renowned when it opened in 1963 for its cluster education concept and still called ideal for the new middle-school set-up 25 years later, has seen widespread gains after being placed on priority status. Its TCAP math scores grew 7.9 percent, and it also showed gains in social studies, reading/language and science.
"You have to focus on the growth," Ware said, "and it's been phenomenal."
While at Dalewood, McQueen may have looked in on a variety of after-school support programs, including math and literacy learning labs that both students and teachers can use.
The labs help keep the students on their individualized tracks and afford teachers professional development to stay ahead of the curve, Ware said.
Woodmore Elementary, once a mid-century buff brick school in which windows offered plenty of natural daylight, now looks more like a high-windowed prison after a 1989 concrete and red brick renovation that school board members at the time termed "horrible." And its test scores, which topped all area elementaries in the late 1960s, placed it several years ago in the iZone.
But the school has made profound recent leaps in TCAP math and reading/language scores and moderate gains in science and social studies, Ware said.
Visiting Woodmore, McQueen might have seen parents, who already have put in more than 4,000 volunteer hours this year, interested community partners, or a Maclellan Foundation-funded pilot mobile learning lab, which parks outside the school four days a week and offers learning stations with access to additional literacy and math skills, she said.
On a recent visit to Chattanooga, the state's new education commissioner had asked about the progress and needs of the priority schools, according to Ware. Shortly afterward, District 5 Hamilton County Board of Education member Karitsa Mosley reached out and invited her to visit the three schools, all of which are in District 5.
"She has a teacher's heart, a passion for children," Ware said.
Now, it's McQueen's job to make sure the gains in those priority schools continue. Because it's in both the students' and the state's best interest for her to do so.