I visited Central Elementary School in City Heights on Tuesday morning as part of a three-day reporting project to see the impact of San Diego Unified’s layoff crisis at the school level.
With one in five teachers at city schools currently being laid off, I wanted to see how the financial mess is affecting teachers, children and parents right now.
I found three stories. Here they are:
‘Yay! Math Time!’
The wonderfully named Sarah Mathy has just walked into Christine Medina’s kindergarten classroom.
Twenty little faces look up expectantly. Glowing cheeks. Eyes sparkling with the opportunity to suck up knowledge.
“Yay! Math time!” cries kindergartner Jacinda Nakhonethap. The group is humming expectantly.
The program Mathy is part of is an innovative mixture of math and language. Expert math resource teachers like her traverse from one class to the next, implementing a routine that’s all about getting second-language learners to think mathematically, while also developing the language to express those thoughts to each other and their teacher.
Thus, when Mathy asks how many shapes are needed to add to a picture made of multicolored tiles, the answer isn’t “10.” It’s “I need 10 yellow hexagons.”
Cindy Marten, principal of Central, has watched this program grow, nourish and flourish. Now, she’s facing cuts that would slice into this and numerous other successful initiatives at her thriving inner-city school.