Colorado schools with declining enrollment turn to “expeditionary learning” in hopes of attracting students

WHEAT RIDGE, CO - MARCH 09: Eduardo Donoso, 9, right, and Faith Valenzuela, 10, left of Donoso, work on breathing exercises during a yoga class at the end of the school day at Pennington Elementary School March 09, 2018. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)

By Monte Whaley

Handmade slingshots propel tiny sticks toward the far wall of the Pennington Elementary  library to the cheers of students learning rocketry from two adult scientists.

Down the hall, first-graders poke around compost piles to understand the importance of organic waste to the ecosystem.

All of this after-hours education is noisy and a little chaotic — but it’s wonderful music to the ears of parents, teachers and administrators trying to pump new blood into the school, which this fall turns into Pennington Expeditionary School.

Pennington is one of many Colorado schools with aging neighborhoods and declining enrollment that are turning to new models and curriculum to attract students from beyond their traditional boundaries. One of those is expeditionary learning, or EL, which emphasizes hands-on, project-based study that takes students outside the classroom and into labs, museums, creeks and meadows.

Pennington backers hope that will capture kids outside of the 50-year-old school’s aging boundaries and turn the conventional neighborhood school into a popular school of choice.

“The school had to do something, and when we all heard about the expeditionary idea, we said we were open for anything,” Pennington parent Leah Dozeman said. She and other Pennington parents became desperate for a solution when the school was targeted for closure last yearby Jeffco Public Schools because of anemic enrollment.

Dozeman is a Pennington graduate and Wheat Ridge city councilwoman who wants her 5-year-old son, Jack, to be able to bike the three blocks from his home to Pennington when he is old enough. The closure would have forced Jack to be bused to another school blocks away from his neighborhood.

“I love this school, and it just looked like it was going to die,” Dozeman said. “The forecast just didn’t look good.”

Pennington, where more than 80 percent of its students qualify for free and reduced-priced lunches, enrolls 147 students in a building constructed over 50 years ago to hold 222.

The district saw Pennington and four other elementary schools slated for closure as a $3.5 million annual drain on its budget. Peck and Swanson in Arvada, and Stober in Lakewood still are open. Pleasant View in Golden closed.

Supporters readily conceded that older neighborhoods in Jefferson County, including the Wheat Ridge homes that surround Pennington, are not producing enough kids to sustain local traditional schools, Pennington principal Sandy Craig said.

“So the district decided to do something bold to capture kids from outside our area and along the (Interstate 70) corridor and get them to come to our school, ” Craig said. “The whole point is to attract new people and see if that will save the school.”

Pennington’s resurrection came after new Jeffco Superintendent Jason Glass last year decided to halt all school closures until the 2019-20 school year. That would give the schools time to create better programs to attract students outside of their boundaries, Glass said. Pleasant View remains on the chopping block.

The district then agreed in December to turn Pennington into an EL school, where students tackle interdisciplinary topics in groups and in the community. Pennington seemed the ideal choice since it already has a 21st Century Learning Grant, which allows it to offer extended  time after regular classes so students can explore hands-on learning, Craig said.

The school will now expand those after-school experiences throughout the regular school day as an expeditionary school, she said. The effort will be led by the school’s new principal, William Carlin. Craig is retiring in June.

Carlin, an enthusiastic man who once owned a rock-climbing gym, also created a comprehensive outdoor-education program at Rifle High School. He sees himself as an ideal choice for Pennington.

“No matter what role I’ve played, my passion has always been to engage students in experiences that they will never forget,” Carlin said. “Whether multiday backpacking in our beautiful wilderness, rafting the Colorado River, or learning how to snowboard at Arapahoe Basin, the kid response is always the same: Wow.

“At Pennington Expeditionary School, we are planning to transform student experience and make school challenging, meaningful and adventurous.”

As many as 150 public schools nationwide — including 26 in Colorado — are part of the EL network. EL’s curriculum is also used in 465 school districts across 36 states. Denver Public Schools turned to the EL curriculum in 2015 for grades 4-8, saying EL’s emphasis on ground-level immersion into a project — or “deeper learning’ — spawns higher test scores.

In fact, DPS students made more academic progress on state English and math tests in 2016 than ever before, and the overall percentage of youths in grades 3-9 who scored at grade level moved within a few points of the statewide average, according to the Colorado Department of Education. However, officials did not draw a straight correlation between the new EL curriculum and the improved tests scores.

Started in 1991 as a collaboration between the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Outward Bound USA, EL network schools are mostly in cities. Seventeen percent are in rural areas.

Nationally, EL students appear to trend upward on test scores and graduate rates. A 2013 Mathematics Policy Research study looked at five sample schools and found that after two years in an EL environment, students gained an extra five months of learning growth in reading and two months in math.

In EL schools, students are given a wide range of topics to study and take several expeditions to eyeball their subjects outside the confines of a school campus. Students are expected to not only learn something but create projects that benefit their community, EL officials said.

Ninth-graders at Springfield Renaissance School in Massachusetts gained acclaim recently when after conducting energy audits on school buildings, they came up with a plan that would have saved the city $30,000 each year.

DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg, a national proponent of school choice, said enriching a neighborhood school with a choice component such as EL can lead to a boost in school numbers. For instance, he said, Denver’s former Kuntsmiller Elementary School, which was deflated, now boasts more than 1,000 kids as Kuntsmiller Creative Arts Academy.

“After tapping into what parents want, you can become more entrepreneurial and offer great schools that appeal to a lot more parents and kids,” Boasberg said. “Schools can be more creative and more innovative, and that allows them to thrive.”