Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 12, December 2003

Copyright 2003 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

Students learn at own pace

at University Cooperative School

By JAMES BUSH

Louise Lipnick came to the University Cooperative School to visit and decided to stay.

Formed in 1975 as a kindergarten, the school was then located in the University Christian Church. "At that point, I had a 4-year-old, so I came and looked at the school," recalls Lipnick. "I was impressed with how the kids were respected. It was not a top down, 'this is what we're going to do today, kids,' type of place."

So Lipnick enrolled her daughter, Alina, in the school and found she enjoyed the program. The following year, Alina graduated but mom stayed, as the school's reading teacher.

The school added first graders in 1977 and expanded to a kindergarten-though-second grade program in 1984, added grades three through five (one year at a time) starting in 1999, and moved to its own building this January. The school is now at 5601 University Way NE, in a building formerly occupied by a motorcycle dealership.

The one constant throughout University Cooperative School's history has been Lipnick, who still teaches K-2 students. "This has become my life for 26 years," she says. "I believe very much in a three-year program."

The school essentially houses a pair of three-year programs: Lipnick and another teacher, Keith Glatzer, instruct 31 lower grade students in the north half of the school's newly renovated home, while teachers Troy Platt and Jim Riley work with 33 third-, fourth- and fifth-graders on the other side of the wall.

What's the magic of three-grade groupings?

An older child can go through life always used to playing that role, explains Riley. "When they're here, they go through that process of being younger, maybe having to ask questions." The following year is spent with older, more experienced students and another group of new kids. "Then, when they're in fifth grade, they have some special responsibilities," he says.

Educators call it "peer teaching," when older students help out younger students in the classroom. Glatzer says his class does projects in mixed-age groups. "It's nice to have the older kids," he says. "They're getting done early and helping the younger ones."

"Another thing about a three-year program is you get to really know these kids," says Lipnick. "When you come back in fall, you're not starting from scratch. You can connect a new piece of information onto something you know they've experienced."

Three-grade groupings also allow kids to learn at their own pace, says Platt. "People come into different talents at different ages," she says.

Riley gives the example of a recent reading assignment. The teachers chose six novels around the theme of wilderness survival. Students are asked to read the first five pages of each book and choose one for their assignment.

"We don't say 'this is a fifth-grade book,'" says Riley. "There might be a fifth-grader for whom reading a large book is a little bit too much to take on right now or a third-grader who's ready."

The "cooperative" element of the school is the required parent involvement. One parent must work at the school one day a week (for about a three-hour period), says Sarah Bland, mother of fourth-grader, Andre. (She quickly adds that his dad, Andre, Sr., usually draws the assignment.) "There are a lot of hands-on projects," she says. "So there are lots of opportunities for assistance."

Many parents serve as guest teachers for lessons about their vocations or hobbies.

Having the parents lending a hand brings down the adult-to-child ratio to about 6-to-1, while turning education into a family experience. It also holds down staff costs and, consequently, tuition rates, notes Bland.

More recently, it got the school a new teacher. Riley, a 10-year teacher in the Shoreline School District with experience in multi-age programs, got his introduction to the school as a guest science teacher for a class which included his son, Sam (now a fifth-grader). "I did science with the K-2 group and just had a blast," he says. Better still, since there was no formal schedule of class breaks, there was no bell to cut short the lessons. In public school, he says, "you'd be in the middle of a math lesson and things were really taking off and then you had to rush to get the kids to music class."

Although the K-2 and the third-grade-through-fifth-grade groups spend most class time in their separate areas, the entire school works together on a eight-week unit each spring (the annual topics, in turn, are Northwest Coast Native Americans, the Tropical Rain Forest, and The Middle Ages). "One of the things I love is that they turn the whole school into whatever it is," says Lipnick.

Glatzer recalls his first visit to the school. "They were doing a unit on the rain forest. I walked into the gym and there were 15 30-foot trees," he says. "They were really going for it."

Adjusting to the relaxed, yet productive pace of learning at the school can be hard for students transferring in from more traditional programs, says Riley. His students get a list of assignments with due dates, but are often given the opportunity to choose which task to work on. It's hard for the new kids, he says, who will often ask "What should I work on?" or "What do you want me to work on?"

Which is, in itself, a lesson, says Platt. "It's learning that the flip side of freedom is responsibility," she says. "We're really training them to be critical thinkers."

The program gets good reviews from its most important audience: the students. "I love going to school here," says Sylvie Baldwin, a 10-year-old fifth-grader. "It's really fun. There's a really good relationship within classes."

When asked where she might consider going to school next year, classmate Katie Trettenero (also 10 and a fifth-grader), says she's thought about a pair of private schools, Billings Middle School (near Green Lake) and Capitol Hill's Northwest School. She notes that "about a quarter" of last year's fifth-grade class went to Billings, then she and Baldwin burst out laughing: a quarter of their class would be two or three kids.

The students seem settled into their new home. The school made the move from University Christian Church during last year's Christmas break. The down payment was funded through about $100,000 raised from the parents of current and former students. The new building, a former auto dealership, was renovated through a huge outpouring of parent and community support, Bland says. Her rough estimate is that about 5,000 volunteer hours went into the renovation.

"We had people there over the Thanksgiving holiday, on Christmas Eve," Bland says. "If you went down on a Sunday, there'd be 20 parents there."

Scott Hansen, owner of general contractor Lockett Construction, donated some 400 hours of employee time to the project. Architect Peter Anderson's firm Imageo de Lineo was paid, she adds, "but he really under-billed us." Attorney Bob Fisko also donated more than $5,000 worth of legal work.

The school continues to build its legacy. A few years ago, Anthony Segi (son of former student Carey Torrence) became its first second-generation student. Merrill Becker, whose two children attended the school, returned as the half-time Spanish teacher. And Lipnick's daughter, Alina, whose education first drew her to the school, returned in 1996 where the two served for five years as mother-daughter team teachers.

But the school's greatest legacy remains its students. "When the kids leave here," says Lipnick proudly, "I think they have a very strong sense of who they are."