Elementary School Earns Honors as National 'Blue Ribbon School'

By Thomas K. Pendergast

Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School was honored by the U.S. Department of Education as a No Child Left Behind - Blue Ribbon School for 2009, joining 22 other select California elementary schools that won the coveted title this year.

Even rarer, it is also in a select group of eight California elementary schools which qualified in two categories, as both a "socioeconomically disadvantaged" school and with those schools ranked academically within the top 10 percent of the state. Nationally, only 80 elementary schools qualified this year in both categories.

The overall ethnic Asian student population at Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School (RLS) is 74 percent, but there are more than 15 different languages represented.

According to school documents, about 55 percent of the students, starting at the second grade (when testing to determine academic ranking begins) and going up to, and including, the fifth grade, are classified as "limited English proficient."

With all students counted, 55 percent of them qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

"In order to earn a blue ribbon they take your test results from the last four years and you have to have made significant growth in all of your qualifying areas, so all your second-language children have to have made growth over those years," explained school Principal Dr. V. Kanani Choy. "Any significant group can only have demonstrated increases along the way and if there's a dip, for any reason, they just didn't do as well that year, which could happen, that disqualifies you."

But Choy emphasized that test scores were only a part of the story because an analytical and multi-layered approach to the challenge is also required.

"You can talk about test scores, but what we talk about here at school is teaching and learning. We look at teachers and classroom teaching practices and how to look at where our children were strong and where our children needed improvement," she elaborated. "We used the test data, analyzed the test data, along with looking at children's work and trying to see where their strengths are and where we as teachers needed to provide more support for them. You do that in a number of ways. You don't always look at only your lowest children ... to raise the level of academics within the whole school you can't forget about those that are scoring very well and those who are mid-range and have potential and with a little more support could do even better."

The school has an average student-to-teacher ratio of 20 students per teacher, that is, dividing the total number of students in the school by the Full Time Equivalent of classroom teachers. This is less than the state average of 20.9 students per teacher, but well above the national average of 15.5 students per teacher, according to the California School Boards Association's figures. The lowest ratio in the nation is Vermont, with 10.8 students for each teacher.

This past year, the RLS student turnover rate, which includes transfers into and out of the school, was three percent. The teacher turnover rate has dropped almost in half since 2004, from 29 percent in the 2003-04 school year to 16 percent in 2007-08.

Choy also stressed that it was a community effort to earn a blue ribbon award.

"Doing it alone is never as good as when you've got the parents in the home working as partners with you because they understand what your goals are. Most people want whatever is best for their children," she said. "It's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of dedicated individuals. This is not a job; we don't punch in and punch out. It's a vocation. People really value their ability to enrich the lives of children."

Choy is aware that they must not become complacent now, but she also does not seem too worried about it either.

"It's still business-as-usual," she said. "The award was never the motivating force behind the work that went into the job. That's always been there and that remains. It's nice to have people recognize your work, but I don't think it's really changed anything here at school except made our commitment stronger to want to maintain that level of service and achievement."

Joshua Ren, a nine-year-old fourth grader, said this is his first year at RLS and he was encouraged to join the student council, so he did.

"They said it would be good to make a difference so I wanted to make the school a little better than it is," he said. "It has been fun."

Ren also said he has received help from the librarian and other staff members in different ways.

"If there's a question I don't understand and I don't see where the page is, they would help me see what page and paragraph it was," he said.

Christina Wong, a 10-year-old fifth grader, has been at RLS since kindergarten and also serves on the student council. She said she was at a lower level in math last year, which met in the morning, instead of later, like the advanced math class that she wanted to join.

"In fourth grade I had to go to morning math, so I had to get better in math and get good grades. This year, I'm in advanced math," she said.

Wong said she remembers the day it was announced over the campus loudspeakers that they'd won the blue ribbon award.

"Everyone was cheering. People were saying that's very great for our school and more people would want to go to our school," she said. "My baby cousin is in preschool and she wanted to go to my school."