(Vol. 2, No. 2 - Summer/Fall 1998)

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Meyzeek Middle School:
A microcosm of middle school issues

There aren't many issues facing Louisville's middle schools that don't play out in one way or another at Meyzeek Middle School..
by John Norton

Meyzeek Middle School is a math/science magnet with an elite clientele that includes about 500 Advance Program students, many of whom come from the well-to-do northeast corner of the county. Meyzeek is also an inner-city school. Half of Meyzeek's students receive free lunch-and they are nearly equally divided among black and white students. About one-fourth of Meyzeek's students come from the county's poorest zip code (40203) where the average 1994 household income was $7,853.

Last year Meyzeek's 1250 middle schoolers were about equally divided among its magnet and non-
magnet populations. Most of the magnet students were white (73%) and most came from outside the downtown neighborhoods around the South Jackson Street school where Meyzeek's "reside" students live. Of the 613 kids in the magnet program, about 75 came from three zip codes right around the school, and about 15 of those students were black. About 72 percent of Meyzeek's non-magnet students are black.

Advance Program enrollment at Meyzeek reflected similar demographics. Among Meyzeek's roughly 500 AP students last year, about 10 percent were black, compared to a total school population that was about 34 percent black. Although Meyzeek principal Debbie Baker says she's not happy with these figures, Meyzeek actually has a larger share of its black students in the Advance Program than most middle schools with AP students-and it increased its black AP enrollment to nearly 13 percent this fall.

Among Meyzeek's non-AP students, about 93 percent of the black 8th graders and about 77 percent of the white 8th graders were novice or apprentice in math on the spring 1997 KIRIS testing. Among non-AP 7th graders, about 89 percent of the black students and about 83 percent of white students were novice or apprentice in reading. All this suggests, as many educators at Meyzeek believe, that the school's student achievement issues have more to do with class and income than with race.

The struggle to be fair

Meyzeek is one of several Louisville middle schools with starkly different populations that have struggled to serve both groups fairly-often under a cloud of suspicion. In Meyzeek's case, the skepticism came from members of the Smoketown and Shelby Park communities that surround the school. "There was a lot of neighborhood rumblings that although Meyzeek was physically associated with Smoketown, it was really about something else," says one black professional who grew up in the community. "A system of apartheid, some people said."

Several years ago, principal Baker began to take more aggressive steps to counteract the school's image as an elitist school concerned mostly about its outer-city clientele.

Baker instituted a new policy that required all teaching teams to include both magnet and non-magnet students in their teaching loads. She created a special team charged with giving extra support and encouragement to sixth-graders (and now seventh-graders) from the neighborhood. Meyzeek also developed one of the district's best middle school Youth Service Centers, headed by Stephon Gilkey, a former state social worker of the year and supported by Anne Ames, an attendance supervisor who has lived in the downtown community for many years and is sometimes referred to, only half in jest, as the "Mother Teresa of Smoketown."

With support from her YSC staff, Baker also began to reach out to the community more. Although she'd been principal at Meyzeek for many years, Baker's ties in the local community "were not as strong as they should have been," says one local neighborhood activist. "She was kind of stand-offish and a lot of people didn't trust her."

In the last two years, Baker has begun to meet regularly with community groups, and this year's establishment of a Community School, which opens Meyzeek to the neighborhood for special programs and after-hours activities, has provided a stronger foundation upon which the school can build its bridge to the community. "Meyzeek is doing good work with the neighborhood kids now," says one downtown activist. "I'm not sure what has prompted this willingness to reach out but I do think that Stephon and Anne are great leaders, and maybe the leaders are now following them."

There may be no better evidence of Meyzeek's determination in recent years to be a school that serves all its kids than its support of a "truancy court"-a weekly legal proceeding that's staged in the Meyzeek auditorium and presided over by family court judge Joan Byer. The philosophy is simple: if kids don't come to school, they won't learn. Byer and the district's juvenile court liaison Linda Wilhelm suspected that early intervention in the school might have a significant impact on truancy rates, and Baker welcomed the experiment. The results have been impressive so far. Targeted students cut their unexcused absences by more than half and raised their grade point average as a group by 30 percent over two grading periods. The program has spread to several other schools.

As Wilhelm noted in an interview late last spring, "We have managed to get these kids to school and that presents a different problem. Now that they're showing up, the schools have to provide a meaningful academic experience for them."

Divisions in the Meyzeek faculty

Wilhelm's observation points to another fact of life for every middle school with a mixed population of "have" and "have-not" kids: the tension between teachers who believe that every student should receive the same amount of academic and social attention and support, and those teachers who, as another social worker puts it, "can't seem to relate to a kid with a background different than their own."

When Baker began insisting that all teachers work with neighborhood kids, some left for other schools. Others stayed but continued to exhibit resentment-or simply befuddlement-when it came to teaching students who lacked middle-class skills, were often not on grade level, and had a different social or cultural "take" on the world.

"I had no idea that the kids that were not in the magnet were so dysfunctional," says one Meyzeek teacher who stuck it out. "Academically, skillwise, socially. I guess one thing that has really been hard for me was dealing with such lack of respect."

Another group of teachers, who had previously taught only neighborhood kids, welcomed (for the most part) the opportunity to teach different kinds of classes, but some continued to resent the "magnet" teachers who remained in the school and seemed unwilling to change their attitudes or teaching styles to accommodate the new group of students they were now expected to teach.

"They don't care about our kids. If they want to know how to teach them, come talk to us. We've been teaching them for years," said one.

Behind the doors of their classrooms, many Meyzeek teachers will speak privately about the divisions in the faculty. "This is not a united school," says one. "We don't have the feeling of a team here."

Baker acknowledges the problem: "I had someone who came to shadow me as part of principal training," she says, "and that's one of the first things I heard. I know it's my responsibility, but it's not an easy problem to solve."

Some outside professionals who have spent time in Meyzeek see teaching issues in the school that they say are repeated in school after school across the district. "You have some teachers who love and hug the neighborhood kids and really want to protect them from some of the very hard things in their lives," says one. "But they don't always know any more about how to raise their academic performance than the teachers who are great with the advanced kids and afraid of the kids from down the street."

Teachers who can cross the lines

There are exceptions, of course-teachers who have developed the skills and knowledge to teach the whole continuum of students at a school like Meyzeek effectively. Sue Chandra, a math teacher who joined the Meyzeek faculty last year after teaching at high-poverty Western Middle is one example, Baker says.

Although Meyzeek remains largely tracked, Chandra, who teaches calculus to Meyzeek's most advanced students, manages to mix some activities among her magnet and non-magnet students.
Chandra searches her neighborhood classes for promising scholars who can be encouraged to work at higher levels. "We try to talk to them about needing a good education so they can become a lawyer, or doctor, nurse, engineer, pilot. And they have role models in this school because they see the other kids doing it and they want to do what they see the other kids doing."

"If I have a math problem on the board and I tell the 'reside' students that it's not for them, they are going to ask me-why is that not for me? We can do it too! So I say-go ahead and do it-prove to me you can do it. So they are willing to try something they see on the board even if it's not for their class because they don't want to feel left behind. They want to do what the others are doing."

Other teachers report similar experiences. One 7th grade team that used to teach only neighborhood kids decided last year to do a unit last year on Rome in which they mixed magnet and non-magnet students. This team had already taken some steps to break down the walls between their two groups-taking them camping and having them share in other non-academic activities "that really do create a lot more interaction," said language arts teacher Kathy Pierce. But this was the first time they'd placed them in a "blended" class for academic instruction.

The team members say they sympathize with magnet teachers who had little experience with "resides" kids before the transition. "Some of it is classroom management. The neighborhood kids can be harder to manage; you have to stay on top of them constantly. It's not that they're all behavior problems, just that there are more in one group than you would have in an AP class," says math teacher Robbyn LaFollette. "You have to be willing to change, be flexible, and you can't always stick to your plan. You spend a lot more time dealing with different needs."

Although they have taught both magnet and non-magnet kids, the 7th grade team said they were surprised at the results when they put the two groups together for the unit on Rome. Pierce and social studies teacher Heather Mohr, who had less experience teaching low-achieving kids, designed the unit together. What happened, they said, was that that the "resides" kids, many of whom were classified as special education students, tried harder and took the work more seriously.

"There was one child in particular who I thought really blossomed. She went home the first night and came back the next day with a poster she had created," said Pierce. "It's a child who it is really difficult to get work out of and she just got-she would spend the whole period working on stuff and going home and bringing things back actually done."

Despite the positive results of this experience, the 7th grade team members say they are not prepared to teach "blended" classes on a regular basis. "That's where I feel like I would need a lot more training," says LaFollette. "I wouldn't have any clue how to do that now." Mohr agrees. "I don't know if I could do that all year."

A plan of action

Principal Debbie Baker is encouraged by the successes of teachers like Chandra and the discoveries by Pierce, Mohr, LaFollette and some other teachers in the school about the power of motivation and role modeling.

"Where we need to be headed-and where I hope we are headed-is toward the kind of professional development experiences that help our teachers be more effective with our neighborhood kids," she says. "The more we can see what's possible for these kids to achieve, the more likely we will be to break down the academic walls in this school, just like I believe we're breaking down the social walls."

Like other middle schools across the district, the Meyzeek faculty spent time in the late spring and summer developing a plan of action that will help teachers set performance standards for all their classes. Theoretically, those standards will be the same for every student "although some students will take longer to get there than others," she says.

The secret to making the performance standards work at Meyzeek is the same as it is for every middle school. Every teacher will have to develop skills and knowledge on par with teachers like Chandra-abilities that make it possible for them to monitor each student's progress and adjust their instruction accordingly. Research across the nation suggests that it can be done, but it may well take years to do it.

Meanwhile, some leaders in Louisville's downtown community are coming to agree with former JCPS equity officer Lucian Yates, who took part in a central office review of Meyzeek last year. Yates said he expected to find two schools in one building, with most of the school's time and attention focused on the most-advantaged kids.

"My perception of Meyzeek changed as a result of that visit," he said. "I saw a principal that's concerned about all the children in her school. She's doing some important things to break down the artificial walls within that school. She seems determined to see it happen."

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