How do you get kids to come to school on a Saturday? In Fort Worth, they build rocket ships
.jpg "Volunteers assemble goody bags for Saturday Learning Quest students at Briscoe Elementary School last year. Fort Worth school officials are expanding the program to more grade levels this year.")
Last year, a couple of Saturdays a month, Valeria Duenez spent part of the afternoon building a Lego treehouse with her friends. Once the treehouse was built, they acted out adventures in it with Lego figurines.
As far as Valeria was concerned, she was just playing with her friends. But she and her classmates were also learning about science and engineering.
Valeria, now a third-grader in the Fort Worth school district, was one of hundreds of kids who went to the district’s Saturday Learning Quest program last year. The program brought elementary students to school on 14 Saturdays last year for extra instructional time In reading and math, plus enrichment activities like art, music and STEM.
Valeria and her classmates did other things in class besides playing with Legos, she said. Sometimes they read short passages about topics like space or volcanoes, and then would answer a few short questions at the end of them. Other times, they worked on math problems, she said.
Valeria’s mom, Yadira Duenez, said she never had to sell Valeria on the idea of going to school on a Saturday. Valeria loves school, Duenez said, and she’s excited about taking her younger sister, who is now in first grade, to the Saturday sessions this year.
The district launched the program last year as one of several efforts aimed at helping students who struggled during school shutdowns regain the ground they lost. After the program’s first year, district officials can point to test data showing it helped close gaps between struggling students and their peers. So this year, the district is adding three grade levels and opening it to any student in those grades who wants to participate.
“Extra instructional minutes don’t hurt any child,” said Marcey Sorensen, the district’s chief academic officer. “It’s beneficial for every single student in Fort Worth ISD.”
An eye toward fun
Like last year, the program will be held on 14 Saturdays throughout the school year, at 24 elementary schools in the district. Parents can register for the program through the district’s website.
When the district launched the program last year, school leaders emphasized that they wanted to make the Saturday sessions fun and engaging, so students would want to come back. Like many districts, Fort Worth has used mandatory Saturday school in the past for students who needed to make up absences. Saturday Learning Quest is a separate, optional program.
Last year, the district paid for the program using $7.3 million in federal relief funding intended to help districts reopen schools safely and help students make up the ground they lost during school shutdowns.
The district, like many others across Texas and nationwide, suffered steep academic declines during the 2020-21 school year, due at least in part to the disruptions brought about by COVID-19. Fewer Fort Worth students in the third through eighth grades met or approached grade level in math or reading in the spring of 2021 as compared to the spring of 2019, according to the results of last year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR.
But those numbers began to rebound last year. Across the district, 38% of third graders met grade level standards in reading on last spring’s state tests. That’s an improvement not only over the previous year, but also over 2019, before the pandemic began. The district also improved its state accountability rating, climbing from a C in 2019 to a B this year. District officials have pointed to those improvements as indications that the efforts of teachers, as well as special programs like Saturday Learning Quest, are helping improve academic outcomes.
Sessions moved students closer to grade-level work
Marcey Sorensen, the district’s chief academic officer, said every student who attended at least 70% of the Saturday sessions showed statistically significant gains on assessment tests from the middle of last year to the end of last year. That means those students, who were struggling at the beginning of the year, moved closer to being ready for grade-level instruction by the end of the year, she said.
That’s an important milestone, she said, because when students are prepared for grade level instruction, it means teachers no longer have to work to catch them up. Instead, they can work to move those students beyond where they are and get them ready for the next grade, she said.
Students who attended last year’s program seemed to enjoy it, Sorensen said. Organizers worked hard to make sure the sessions were fun and engaging, she said. The Saturday sessions included instruction in reading and math, but also enrichment activities like art, music and P.E., as well as STEM activities like flying drones and building with Legos.
Students in the program last year told district leaders that they especially liked the STEM activities, Sorensen said. So in this year’s program, those activities will be offered every Saturday instead of every other Saturday, she said.
Last year, the program was open to first-, second- and third-graders who fell in the bottom quartile in reading or math. About three-quarters of the students who were eligible registered for the program last year, Sorensen said. Of those who registered, about 60% attended at least 70% of the time, she said.
This year, the district aims to broaden the audience for the program. Besides opening it to students in kindergarten and fourth and fifth grades, the district is also making the program available to any student in those grade levels, Sorensen said. Even students who aren’t struggling could benefit from the program, she said.
Now that district officials understand how much a student’s attendance can affect what they get out of the program, they can focus on working with parents to make sure students who are registered attend as often as possible, she said.
This will be a critical year for the program, Sorensen said, because once district officials have two years of data, they can begin to make decisions about the program’s future. School districts are required to spend the third round of federal relief money by September 2024. After that point, district leaders will need to begin to decide which programs they want to keep and which they want to end. If the Saturday program is successful, district leaders could decide to build it into the permanent budget, she said.
Saturday students progressed in reading
Barbara Hollingsworth, a fourth grade teacher at Edward J. Briscoe Elementary School, taught reading to first- and second-graders in the program last year. Hollingsworth said she could see the progress students were making. When they came in, many of the students in both grades had problems with phonemic awareness — the ability to identify the individual sounds that make up spoken words, she said. Students who struggle with phonemic awareness generally go on to struggle with reading. But by the end of the 14 sessions, those same students could read the entire stories and answer questions about them, Hollingsworth said.
One of the benefits of the Saturday program is smaller class sizes, Hollingsworth said. Her Saturday classes were never larger than about 10 students, she said, and none were larger than 15. During the week, classes in fourth grade and under could have up to 22 students. Teachers in the Saturday sessions still did whole group instruction, she said, but the smaller class sizes allowed for more individual instruction. That one-on-one time with students gives teachers a chance to see areas where they’re struggling and help them master those concepts and skills, she said.
Students also told Hollingsworth they liked the enrichment activities in the program. Every Saturday, aside from reading and math, students would also get the chance to do art, music, P.E. or hands-on science-based activities, she said. Those activities made students happy to come back to every session, she said.
“My students were very excited,” she said. “When we got to the last day, they wanted to keep coming.”
Briscoe Elementary students built rocket ships
Bianca Hackney, an instructional coach for science and math at Briscoe Elementary School, led students in STEM activities in last year’s program. The activities the kids did on Saturdays were more open-ended and allowed for more creative exploration than what they would get during the week, she said.
For example, on one Saturday when the district’s STEM trailer was at the school, students learned about lift while learning how to fly drones, Hackney said. Then, they went back into the classroom to design and build their own rocket ships out of paper, cardboard and tape. They have to figure out how the shape of the ship’s nose and how many fins it has and where they were placed would affect how it flew.
Once the rocket ships were done, students took them outside to test them, she said. Using an air compressor on the STEM trailer for propulsion, students flew their rockets across the school’s parking lot.
“Some kids had their rocket ships go over our fence and by the railroad tracks, which is quite far from where we were standing,” she said.
It’s important for young kids to be exposed to those kinds of projects, Hackney said, because they require them to challenge themselves and think creatively. There’s no single right way to build a rocket ship, so students had to try a few ideas to see what worked best. When an idea didn’t work, they had to work on it to see how they could improve it, she said.
Hackney said she’s glad to see the district opening the program up to all students in kindergarten through fifth grade. The fallout from the pandemic was so widespread both in and out of the classroom that nearly all students in the district were affected in some way, she said. Besides, she said, the kids who came last year had a great time.
“It was fun. And that’s what school should be,” she said. “It should be fun. Kids should enjoy learning. So I’m glad that we’re extending this opportunity to all students.”
