Some Background about Susan Fedor
and CrossRoads Middle School in Columbia, SC

After 32 years of school opening days, I still did not sleep the night before the first day of the 2000-2001 school odyssey. I had retrieved my lucky red shoes from the back of the closet, shoes I've worn every first day. Well, not the same exact pair -- once they were high heels, now they are flats. The size and width have increased over time. But the good luck is holding.

I have spent all but four of my 32 years in middle schools. I have been a teacher (language arts, remedial reading, special education / learning disabilities, journalism, and first aid (recalling the wide ranging exploratories of the 70's!) while over the years sponsoring the Beta Club, Student Government, yearbook, and motorcycle club). I have served as team leader and department head. My undergraduate training was as a secondary English teacher. My first year of teaching taught me that I had not learned nearly enough, and I hied myself to graduate school to learn how to teach reading. (We called it "reading" then; "literacy" was not a term in wide use.)

I loved teaching. I was asked to consider administration. I was a disciplinarian for about five years. It made me wiser and more compassionate and clearer about my own core value: what serves the child best. I also came to understand that most problems children either create or face in middle school would be repeated endlessly for the rest of their lives. And that's why we have an obligation to help them become better at solving their personal dilemmas here. I rarely read of a controversy in real life that is not echoed in some 8th-grade memory.

Then, because I read and read and read, and because I am curious and want to know what people have learned that I have not, and because I went to every training I could sign up for to increase my knowledge base, I asked for a position that focused on curriculum and instruction. It was during this time that I worked with a woman who supported me and encouraged me to grow and to continue to learn, and to dream innovation. This was so satisfying to me that I stayed as an assistant principal for many years. As it turns out, I probably stayed too long.

Finally, I turned 50, finished my Ph.D. (I hated for it to end) and decided to discover what I was really made of. I left the district I had been in for 27 years to be named the principal of an urban school two blocks from my home. (I could hear school conversations on the walkie-talkies from my living room.) Not good. I followed a principal, much beloved, who had been in the school for more than a decade. Also, not a great portent. So, two years ago, when I was invited back to start a school, new in name and in grade configuration, I leaped at the opportunity. And that has made all the difference.


Imagining "The School of Your Dreams"

I read Michelle Pedigo's diary last summer after having met her at a conference. She had star power and attracted me to her out of a group of 200 others in attendance at the July 2000 "National Conference on Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment in the Middle Grades." She clearly was the "it" principal to get to know.

Her session on her "School to Watch" was like attending a visioning exercise on Schools of Your Dreams. I felt like the world's biggest underachiever. What had I been doing for 32 years? Treading water while she shot straight up on a planned trajectory? You see, the term "objective" was not in use in 1968, except in opposition to the word "nominative." Careers just evolved; they were not planned. Michelle had a plan -- one that was informed from reading and study and experience working with a mentor principal. Hers is practice informed by research, coupled with clear vision and energy to make it happen. Mine was messier than that, but I like to think we are much in the same mindset even if we are at different stages on our professional timelines. We want a middle school that works for all children and establishes teachers as learners, too. We want schools that are learning communities for all who live there: adult and child.

What we get are schools that come to reflect their principals and their core beliefs. We hope those beliefs lead us without wavering to "true north." We discover the real meaning of integrity: the tendency of a person to behave in a predictable fashion irrespective of the pressures that are brought to bear. What we get in the principalship is a hero's journey with ordeals and rewards unsuspected. What we become is truer versions of ourselves -- selves we would not have been without the experience. On the first day of our school's opening two years ago, our tee shirts were embroidered with the phrase, "CrossRoads to a New Adventure," and every year, an adventure it has been.


A Sixth-Grade School: An "inspiration of necessity"

CrossRoads Middle School was an inspiration of necessity. The issue was re-zoning. No one wanted to. A parent, seeking a win-win solution to the standoff, suggested a sixth-grade school. At the same time re-zoning was a hot topic; the district had undertaken a study of middle schools, involving parents, teachers (elementary, middle, and high school teachers), and students. Its purpose was to refocus middle school practice to more closely reflect recommendations being made by the Southern Regional Education Board and other groups emphasizing increased academic rigor.

The results of the study were published in a document that became the framework which established the outline for what was to become CrossRoads Middle School. This process, however, was not without months of rancorous debate about the perils of building in an additional transition for children.

The debate solidified our resolve as a faculty to make this school a success. The faculty was combined from two middle schools where they had been housed. They were aware of the skepticism and doubt that clouded our beginning. It galvanized them into a unity of spirit and resolve to succeed. They unpacked their respective bags and repacked them with ideas for a new school.

They did not stint in their willingness to make changes and to create an identity for this school that was distinct and consistent. This included everything from a new discipline policy, to agreed-upon curriculum decisions, to schoolwide procedures from accountability for Channel One viewing, to the test for worthy comments: "Is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?"


Some school background

We have the same schedule as other middle schools in the district: alternating A/B days with four, 85-minute blocks. Language arts and math are taught daily. Social studies rotates with science as do two related arts classes. Teachers plan daily in teams and individually. There are nine teams, most of which have six teachers. Two are two-teacher teams.

School District Five, which overlaps Lexington and Richland Counties, is a suburban school district located in northwest Columbia, South Carolina. The Dutch Fork and Irmo areas of the district have two high schools, two middle schools, one sixth grade middle school, and eight feeder elementary schools. If anyone wants to know how fares the district, they need go no farther than CRMS where we welcomed 1,030 sixth graders this August.

In our school, named an Award of Excellence school in its second year (one of two in the state annually), our students scored at the top on our Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT) last year. Although we are focused on our "achievement gaps," our minority students typically outscore minorities in other schools in the state, Our minority population is about 32%, and we have about 17% of our students who are on free or reduced lunch. Fewer than one-half of our students live with intact birth families. Approximately one-third of our students fall into each of our academic levels: grade level, advanced, and honors classes. Only language arts and math are "ability grouped."

Unique to our school is the exploratory wheel which includes Latin, another foreign language, and 18 weeks of computer training for all students. The Latin study is further developed in language arts with our vocabulary program, STEMS, which is amplified in our study of Greece and ancient Rome in social studies.


This year's adventure

Our adventure for 2000-2001 was mapped last summer when teachers came in to develop plans for schoolwide study skills instruction and application.

They also developed a long-term research project (Heidi Hayes Jacobs, our mapping guru, exhorts: no reports after fifth grade!) in which students frame an authentic question for study, identify resources, and ultimately prepare an oral presentation of their findings in a public demonstration of mastery (nod of thanks to the Coalition of Essential Schools). We have worked so closely to be unified in the curriculum we provide our students that curriculum mapping is, we think, a snap for us. So we are taking it to the next level with examination of student work to calibrate our understanding of work that meets and exceeds the standards.

We are also comparing assessments to learn from each other and to develop our own set of principles of best practice. We've established the "North Star" team staffed with two teachers who are by nature "rescuers." They started the year with the ropes course and begin each morning with a morning meeting. The children in this team are predicted to have trouble with grade six in a new school. Some did have trouble and are repeating the grade. We are "single-gender grouping" their math and language arts classes. All know now that they are both to be "cherished and challenged," the key words in our mission statement.

So, we are off to a new adventure. And every year is a new adventure in a one-year school! To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, who said that he was "an old man but a young gardener," I am a mature (I couldn't bring myself to type old) woman but a young principal. And I am excited.

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