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Going back and Moving Forward
BY STEVE SHEPPARD INDEPENDENT WRITER Summer is fleeting, which is something island students don't need to be reminded of as the last days of vacation wind down. Island schools open for a new year next week with all the promise new beginnings hold. To get a true handle on Nantucket life, there is no better place to start than at the schools. If you don't think the island population has grown, consider that there are three primary schools on Nantucket, and two separate schools providing instruction through eighth grade. The Nantucket public schools will be greeting students next week, as will the pri- vate Nantucket New School and Nantucket Lighthouse School. There will be new teachers at all three schools, and new principals at the Nantucket Elementary School and Cyrus Peirce School. The Nantucket Lighthouse School, moreover, will welcome students to a brand new building (see related story, page 16).
NANTUCKET NEW SCHOOL Founded by Linda Zola in 1985, the New School has been housed in its permanent quarters on Nobadeer Farm Road since 2002, hosting grades from Pre- Kindergarten to eighth. Headmaster and veteran educator Dave Provost, who will also be teaching eighth grade English, is in his fourth year at the school. There will be 16 full-time teachers, with four parttime teachers, including new art teacher and renowned island artist Katie Trinkle Legge, Provost is still looking to fill the part-time Spanish teacher position that opened when Chris Getoor took a leave of absence to tutor the children of Presidential candidate John Edwards during the campaign. Other new teachers include former Nantucket Elementary School fifth grade teacher Jim Sulzer, and former Nantucket High School science teacher Matt Liddle. Sulzer will be the grade 5 homeroom teacher, while Liddle will teach math and science in the upper school, grades 5 through 8. Anew section will also be added to the pre-school, as three-year-olds will be welcomed this year, bringing total school enrollment to about 130 students. "We're up about 30 percent from last year," Provost noted. "All told, we added 10 new teachers, both full and part-time, including staff for the pre-school program." To accommodate the growth, there will be an additional classroom in the building; students will also be using a classroom at the nearby Strong Wings facility. The New School will also go through the accreditation process this year. "We are going to have our first accreditation by the National Association of Independent Schools," Provost said. "We just completed a year-long self evaluation. In late October, we'll be visited by a team of six leaders and teachers from other independent schools around New England. We're anticipating that at the end of their visit, we'll be the only accredited private school on Nantucket. It's a pretty significant and pretty involved process." There will also be the upper school trip to New Hampshire later in September as students take part in an educational program directed by the Appalachian Mountain Club. All of which makes Provost eager to get going. "This will be my twentieth beginning of school as an educator and I can't remember a year that I have been more excited about, just based on the number of exciting changes and great new faces that will be joining the community next week." NANTUCKET LIGHTHOUSE SCHOOL The new year will be especially exciting at the Nantucket Lighthouse School because 60 students and seven teachers will enter a new school building. "This is it," school co-founder Lizbet Carroll Fuller said this week. "This will be the first time we've been under one roof in three years." After starting out in the year 2000 with 12 students and two teachers in a rented barn at NISDA, the Lighthouse School moved to Hooper Farm Road the following year. As the school grew, however, students were split between Hooper Farm Road and a modular classroom on Rugged Road, while a new school was being built by parents and volunteers. The Lighthouse School provides education to preschool children through fifth grade. There are usually no more than 10 students per teacher. Carroll, a former Nantucket Elementary School teacher, and Elizabeth Sundell co-founded the school. "I had left the elementary school and had my own preschool group at home," Carroll recalled. "After two years of pre-school, the mothers asked for a kindergarten year. My little pre-school group ultimately became our first fifth grade class." The Lighthouse School curriculum becomes more structured as students get older, so the transition to grade 6 and public school is relatively smooth. "Our curriculum is based on what we know about how kids learn and what's appropriate for kids at a given time," Carroll said. "We have small class sizes and individualized instruction. We consider social curriculum as important - to work with others; to have respect for other people and a responsibility to the world." For the first time in four years, Carroll will return to the classroom. "I'm going back into pre-school," she said. "I'm excited about that. The building has taken so much of our attention." The selflessness that went into the new school building will serve as its own type of lesson, Carroll believes. "We use stories and story telling as a medium for giving information to kids, and one story that often comes up is Rumplestiltskin and spinning gold from straw. We've all had our heads down trying to make this happen, but now when we pick up our heads and look, we really have such a wonderful space because of teachers, parents, volunteers and friends of the school. "It's a lesson for the kids to see the culmination of a lot of people's energy and hard work. All of a sudden we have a sidewalk ... everybody has a classroom... we have a hallway. ... So there's a lot of little things. All of a sudden, we have a great, nice space." NANTUCKET PUBLIC SCHOOLS Everything's also in place at the three public schools, including new principals at both the elementary and Cyrus Peirce schools. Assistant schools superintendent Dr. Carlos Colley will fill the slot vacated by last year's elementary school principal Paul Koulouris on an interim basis. At the Cyrus Peirce School, the well-respected and veteran teacher Barbara White has been coaxed out of retirement to assume the principalship there, also on an interim basis. Schools superintendent Dr. Robert Pellicone, who is entering his third year in the Nantucket schools and second as superintendent, is confident both administrators are the right choice for their respective positions. "This will give us more lead time (to fill the positions permanently)," he said. "We won't settle for second best." Thirteen teachers are either new to the system or returning this year. Popular high school English teacher Rob Norton, for example, is back, as is Rebecca Hickman at Cyrus Peirce and former teaching assistant Kim Freitas. Returning to the school as a high school math teacher is 2001 NHS graduate Neil Breault, who taught for the last two years in New York. "It's good to get talent back when you can," Dr. Pellicone noted. "I feel much better that we've got our people in place." In all, there are 125 teachers in the public schools, with 46 teaching assistants. There are 1,313 students enrolled, with 625 at the elementary school, 278 at the Cyrus Peirce Middle School and 410 at Nantucket High School. Although there had been talk of adding portable classrooms at the elementary school, Dr. Pellicone said there is adequate classroom space for the time being. Space needs will have to be addressed in the near future, however. "We're not going down (in student enrollment)," he said. "We're going up." He said projections predict the school population will be between 1,400 to 1,500 students by the year 2020. The parking crunch at the elementary school should be alleviated by the addition of 80 new parking spaces. Although students return to school Tuesday, teachers returned to work yesterday. I | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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