Lafayette Elementary School Wins Academic Honors

By Alastair Bland

Lafayette Elementary School, located at Anza Street and 37th Avenue, has received two awards of recognition from the state of California in the past year.

The honors award the school for such accomplishments as high Academic Performance Indexes (API) and providing an exceptional learning environment for children of all ethnicities, social upbringings and intellectual capabilities. Only one other school in the city - Sunset Elementary in the Outer Sunset District - has received the California Distinguished Schools Award (CDSA), which is granted every year to select public institutions throughout the state.

Next year, middle schools and high schools will be eligible for the honor. The year after, elementary schools will be eligible once again.

Recipients of the CDSA are initially judged as eligible based on the school's collective API scores, which must average above 800. The highest individual score possible is 1,000. If interested in receiving the award, the school must then produce a lengthy report detailing its aptitude in its curriculum standards, parent involvement, professional development, school philosophies, community involvement, after-school programs and several other fields.

"We're thankful that standardized test scores have increased, but good education is about a lot more than that," said Ruby Brown, principal of Lafayette. "You'd be surprised at the gifts some of these kids have who may not do as well academically, but boy do they shine at singing, or art, or some of the other skills people are beginning to recognize."

Michael Baumstein, chair of the School Site Council and father of a Lafayette second-grader, led the application process for the awards. It began in November 2005, and involved months of research, interviews and observations of school activities.

In spite of the honor of being recognized, Baumstein said that was not the school's ultimate impetus.

"It's nice to have the recognition but it's not really necessary. We're honestly all about education and the students. If it's good for them, it's good for us," he said.

The second honor received by Lafayette is the Title-1 Academic Achievement Award, which recognizes high scores on the API with specific consideration for the accomplishments of children in sub-groups, including Filipino, Latino, African American, Alaskan Native, students with disabilities and English language learners.

"It was a similar but more focused process," Baumstein said.

Brown promotes involvement of families in school protocol while employing a philosophy of flexibility in managing her 410 pre-K through fifth grade students. She believes that old-fashioned teaching tactics are no longer effective in the public school system.

"It's not like it was when I was little, when we had to look straight ahead and keep both feet on the floor," Brown said. "You achieve real goals not by being so strict that the kids look like little soldiers. That doesn't work anymore. You want structure, but you also want flexibility, and although we have priorities, how each child is going to meet those priorities is what we work to address."

Brown and the school faculty, in cooperation with parents and families of the students, have devised progressive means in the past several years to enhance the learning environment at Lafayette. A teacher-student mentoring system, a family-to-family guidance program, and daily homework tutoring sessions to make sure that all students go home after school equally prepared have contributed to the school's reputation of excellence.

"Lots of times," said Brown, "high academic achievement is due to parent presence at home and at school, but we're making sure that students of parents who can't keep a presence also have a chance to succeed."

Twenty-four elementary schools in San Francisco applied for the CDSA and were denied, yet no competition has come between them and Lafayette, said Baumstein.

"At the end, it's one city and one school system," Baumstein said. "That's what matters, and we feel pretty good about getting San Francisco back on the map of distinguished schools."

"For us and San Francisco, this is a great thing to build on," said Baumstein. "We see this as a great starting point, not an ending point. We've looked at where there are soft spots for improvement, and we've laid out steps to get even better. There are a few good things on the drawing board for next year."