Staff Photo by Angela Lewis Foster Lucas Davis, left, and Meko Beasley, laugh while working on their inventions in class Tuesday, January 10, 2016 at Rivermont Elementary School.When the stars align to make Hamilton County public education great again - as they have at Rivermont Elementary School - it's easy to trace the forces pulling and pushing those stars in line.
For starters, look at the kids' smiling faces. They are open, grinning, ready - the faces of learning.
Why? Because they aren't just sitting at desks for a rote reading lesson. Instead, their reading of "Three Billy Goats Gruff" blends reading with science and art and imagination.
They are, unconsciously learning the skill of critical thinking as they become inventors - bustling around a table to figure out ways to move the baby billy goats, in this case small marbles, across a wooden bridge without falling off into the swarms of trolls waiting below.
The 240 youngsters at Rivermont are a diverse group: 56.9 percent white and 22 percent disabled. A majority are from low-income families in a white-collar neighborhood where the median income is about $42,300.
But those students have several distinct advantages.
' They attend a school with a good principal - Nikki Bailey took over the school's leadership last summer fresh with new ideas and clear vision of her goal to make the school so stellar that it will turn around the dwindling enrollment caused as more and more parents in the neighborhood sent their children to private schools. (In 2013, Rivermont had more than 400 students.)
' They attend one of the few schools in the county where every teacher has been ranked effective, and a majority of teachers were ranked "highly effective."
' They also attend a school that has a strong cadre of community volunteers.
Those are the things that act as strong cosmic gravitational force fields to keep a school's stars aligned.
Those are the things that will keep the children - and the round marble billy goats - from rolling off the bridge.
The vast majority of Hamilton County's 42,000 students aren't so lucky - yet.
Nearly one-third of our county's 3,000 teachers are rated "least effective," and Hamilton County has almost twice the number of "least effective" classroom teachers as the state's other major school districts and the state average.
But school, county and community leaders have a road map and example in Rivermont Elementary. There, a school full of effective teachers helped the school's disadvantaged students buck the "low-performing" trend. Rivermont students posted academic gains during the 2014-15 school year.
We know what works: A constellation of highly effective teachers, excellent principals and community support.
Now Bailey is working to improve on that model and rebuild parental trust.
When she moved into her office at Rivermont - the smallest school in the county - she adopted a curriculum focused on science, technology, engineering, arts and math, known as STEAM. The school is in the process of building two STEAM labs, providing teachers and students with spaces to tinker, create, build and learn together. Strauss Construction and COGENT Studio are building and designing the lab for free, and the school has raised more than $7,000 to stock the labs with learning tools such as microscopes and art supplies.
"Teachers need to be able to be creative and not teach inside a box. And the kids don't even know they're learning when they're this engaged," Bailey told Times Free Press reporter Kendi Rainwater recently.
That's how "Three Billy Goats Gruff" surfaced recently in the science room at Rivermont. A class of first-graders was given some supplies and told to get their billy goats to safety. Think MacGyver.
One group of students built railings on their bridge. Another tried to slingshot the marbles across the bridge with a spoon and rubber band. One student held up a balloon and reasoned that putting the marble inside and rolling the bubbled "goat" across the bridge would keep the baby safe from the trolls.
In Hamilton County, where 60 percent of third-graders cannot read at their grade level, where our students systemwide tested below the state average in nine of the 10 TCAP categories and where nearly 60 percent of our high school graduates are not jobs-ready for Chattanooga area employers, we know we have to do something - and do it fast.
Rivermont offers us a shining North Star.