As Math and Reading scores across the USA continue with a free-fall from good performances due to COVID-19-induced school closures in 2020, a charter school in Florida has rolled up its sleeves to help students beat the odds.
Created in 1998 in Gainesville, Florida by two veteran educators, Verna and Simon Johnson, “The Caring and Sharing Learning School” objective has been to help bridge the gap between black and white students. Today, they have achieved beyond the mark they set, as students are regularly posting the highest learning gains in their district.
In Alachua County, where the state’s achievement gap between Black and White students is the widest, Caring and Sharing’s pupils have done well to ensure the white students are now within touching distance by closing the gap.
According to Verna Johnson, the school has been accepting children deemed untrainable and has proceeded to tutor them in ways that inspire them to greatness. She believes it is important to make the children understand to not let others set the tone for what they can achieve.
After spending years as the first black tenured professor at the University of Florida College of Education, Verna and her husband, Simon Johnson were ready to retire in the late 1990s when they got the idea for the school. They used their savings to purchase a 12-acre plot of run down-houses, cleared the land, and opened their school. So far, the student body has grown remarkably from 31 students in 1998 to 255 today.
In 2008, Curtis Peterson, who like his mother is a longtime educator, became principal of the award-winning charter school that is located across the street from the city’s low-income housing complex.
He says that focusing on students’ academic strengths is one of the key ingredients behind the school’s success.
Peterson attributes meticulous monitoring of students’ progress and offering what they need to know at any given time as integral parts of the school’s recent growth.
“We pretest students at the beginning of every unit and group them together based on their results, then we teach according to the groups that they’re in,” he says of the school’s strategy. “At the end of the unit, we test them again to see how much they’ve learned.”
That approach certainly worked for Marlaisha Vereen, now 19, who attended the school through sixth grade and plans on entering law school after her graduation last month from nearby Santa Fe College.
“They really saw the potential in me when I didn’t see it myself,” says Vereen.
Peterson insists that he and his teachers are determined to continue nurturing the potential in all their students.
Tamara Glenn writes on interesting life stories.
