Report on a School Visit

School Visit This report is about my visit to the Roberto Clemente Middle School in Paterson, New Jersey. The visit was conducted on April 4th, in the afternoon. It was rainy. Paterson is a densely-populated urban area, and the school is in an urban neighborhood. The visit was conducted by Dr. Goldman, who indicated that there was some issue that day where the students were scheduled to take a district test called Parcc but the system was down so that test had to be rescheduled.

This school caters to an ethnically diverse community. Dr. Goldman estimated that around 90% of the students speak another language at home, and use English mostly for school. The students are provided with bilingual classes in some case. The area is underprivileged, and most of the students receive a school lunch and breakfast. The school also provides what was termed "full service" for around 75 students. This means providing them with glasses, dental work, pediatric and behavior service, as the families are unable to provide these things.

The full service allows these students, some of whom are new to America, to have a better chance at integrating and at keeping up with their studies. There are a lot of issues with parents who do not place much value on education, and this is reflected in things like poor behavior and poor attendance. The school has adopted several strategies for dealing with this.

For kids that have poor attendance the school will sometimes have an attendance dinner, which is something where the parents and students come to the school for a free dinner. The objective is just to reconnect the students and parents with the school, and make the case that the student should be coming to school regularly. This is an opportunity to sell education to these people, who maybe do not value it or understand its value.

Another teacher we talked to later indicated that it was important to have a good relationship with the parents and the students, to keep them engaged. There are other things that are done in terms of discipline. Students in gym class must have gym attire, for example, or they will not be allowed to participate. The gym teachers were observed. They had a strict discipline about cussing but there were a lot of students who were not really engaged even though the teacher was trying to be enthusiastic about participation.

So there are definitely some challenges with encouraging these kids to be active. In a discussion about testing, it was noted that the state scores went down because there are a lot of non-native English speakers. They still have to take the tests, even though some are pretty new to America. They probably do not do well on the test, which drags down the scores.

The school tries to help these students as much as possible with the tests to help their scores, but also because these students need to learn and get caught up with the other kids in English. But this is the challenge for a school in a poor area with a lot of foreign immigrants. Kids are either poor, don't speak English or both. When the parents are not motivated to help their kids, then that only compounds the problem. The rounds were made of a few classrooms.

In the first classroom, it was a music class taught by a Mr. Webb, who had 22 kids. The kids seemed to enjoy that we were evaluating the class and seemed quite engaged in showing off their musical skills. This was a bit of a contrast to the gym class. In the second class, there were no kids, just a teacher. The teacher explained the curriculum. She is a math teacher, and explained that they have a lot of tests of different types to evaluate the students.

So she tries to make learning fun and keep them engaged. This is at a level when math can start to get really hard for some kids so keeping it interesting is essential, especially when there are standardized tests. In the third class, there was Mr. Ocasio, who teaches 8th grade English. He highlighted some of the issues that they face at the school. These include the fact that many students do not know much English and the issue with some of the parents not caring.

There are some really troubled kids, too. Mr. Ocasio noted that he had two students who had just come out of juvenile detention, two who were prostitutes and others who were below average at reading. These are bigger challenges than most 8th grade teachers in America might be facing. There are students who are abused at home and see school as a safe place. There are many challenging issues that are not related to education, which is tough enough. In our last classroom, the teacher Mrs.

Burns indicated that the students in this district have to take more tests than in other districts, something like 50 more tests per year, because the district is failing.