Photo: Katy Hyson/WUFT News
At a time when math and reading scores across the nation have plummeted due to school closures during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a charter school in Florida is empowering its students — 92 percent of whom are Black — to beat the odds.
In Alachua County, where the state’s achievement gap between Black and White students is the widest, Caring and Sharing’s pupils have more than closed it.
“We are taking children who people have said were untrainable and letting them know what they can do,” the school’s founder, Verna Johnson, says in this week’s PEOPLE of the school’s pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students, who often go on to excel in advanced placement programs and earn college degrees.
“Equally important,” Johnson, 82, adds, “we’re making them understand to not let anybody tell them what they can’t do.”
Founders Verna and Simon Johnson.Katy Hyson/WUFT News
Johnson and her husband, Simon Johnson, the first Black tenured professor at the University of Florida’s College of Education, were on the verge of retiring in the late 1990s when they used their savings to purchase a 12-acre plot of run down-houses, cleared the land and opened their school. The student body has grown from 31 students in 1998 to 255 today.
In 2008, Curtis Peterson, who like his mother is a longtime educator, became principal of the award-winning charter school that is located across the street from the city’s low-income housing complex.
Focusing on students' academic strengths, he says, is one of the key ingredients behind the school’s success.
Principal Curtis Peterson.Katy Hyson/WUFT News
“We know exactly what each student knows and what they need to know at any given time,” says Peterson, who checks in on each classroom to monitor students' progress multiple times each day.
“We pretest students at the beginning of every unit and group them together based on their results, then we teach according to the groups that they’re in,” he says of the school’s strategy. “At the end of the unit, we test them again to see how much they’ve learned.”
“They really saw the potential in me,” says Vereen, “when I didn’t see it myself.”
Peterson insists that he and his teachers are determined to continue nurturing the potential in all their students.
“At the end of the day, what we’re really doing here is providing hope for kids and families who may not have otherwise realized how great they are,” he says. “And with hope you can literally attain anything.”
source: people.com
