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Students, teachers embrace new school
Locating the School of Dreams Academy office during a New Mexico rain shower is a bit surreal. The cool rain patters steadily on both umbrella and pavement, distracting you from visual cues. Navigate past college students, doggedly walking through shallow puddles, protectively clutching newly purchased books and scowling at the unwelcome surprise of rain.
Through the glass Student Center doors, pasta series of handmade signs, you dimly glimpse movement • a number of students are clustered inside. Open the doors and you discover teens and tweens dressed in roughly identical uniforms of plain indigo shirt and khaki pants, whisking busily about like ants over piles of torn, cut and flattened cardboard.
They talk animatedly, buzzing cheerily past with cast-off pieces of styrofoam, duct tape, paperboard cylinders and broad cardboard sheets, making jokes and joshing each other. This organized chaos occurs under the watchful eye of an adult. He's perched at the epicenter on a metal folding chair, dressed business-casual, and quietly answers questions when students approach.
They're making found object sculptures from inert, non-hazardous trash retrieved from a nearby illegal dump site during their school community service project entitled "New Mexico: Land of Enchantment or Land of Entrashment?"
According to SODA teacher Robyn Darling-Greenly, it's all part of a synthetic learning process, welding skills and concepts from across the curriculum, which helps make the only charter school in Valencia County unique.
"We wear many hats around here," Darling-Greenly said.
A pieced-together banner of white butcher paper hopefully proclaims "School of Dreams Academy" in blue sharpie marker above the closed double-doors. Underneath the buzz of young voices, a lecture faintly drifts through the tiny gap in the double doors.
At the moment, the School of Dreams Academy occupies both floors of the UNM-Valencia Campus's Student Center and the upper story of an adjacent building connected by an overpass. It's a temporary situation while the permanent campus, located at Riverfront Plaza, a Los Lunas shopping center east of the Rio Grande river, is renovated for the school.
So far, the two campuses have cohabited peacefully with a minimum of interaction between age groups.
"We're just trying to be as inconspicuous here as possible," said school secretary Jaime Baca.
As if to warn away lost college students who have wandered to the end of an unassuming hallway on the upper floor, another hand-made sign reads: "No one beyond this point. School of Dreams office."
Fuzzy pens with rainbow-colored feathers brightly in the lurk in a vase on the secretary's counter, standing out among a lack of identifying plaques and school paraphernalia.
A trio of students wait, sitting in a corner of the lobby. Denton Shaver, a seventh grader from Bosque farms, is shy. Allie Heffner, another seventh grader from Los Lunas, bursts with enthusiasm. Robert Dixon, a Peralta ninth grader has the typical teenage mix of confidence and awkward reserve.
He's exceedingly polite, blunt about himself and jokes easily.
All three are students of Greenly, a social studies and language art teacher with a past in the Peace Corp. They have three different reasons for being here, reflecting a diverse student body drawn from across socio-economic, community and achievement lines.
"I thought 'Oh my gosh... that'll be really cool. A cyber school,'" Allie said when asked why she came to SODA. She added that, like several other students she's met, she came to avoid bullying at her last school.
So far, the school environment has been really supportive to her, and she's made friends with kids who had similar problems in the past.
Denton claims that he "Got kinda bored at other schools," and always seemed ahead of everyone. For him, the ability to go at his own pace has helped him stay interested in what he's learning. Robert jokes that "Flying through school with F's" brought him here, but now that he can go at his own pace, tackling more difficult concepts at a slower pace, and breezing through ideas that come more easily to him, he's been "boosted up a level in math already." He grins mischievously. "I get to sit by a window now."
Students at School of Dreams Academy study under a revolutionary system with four, eight-hour days, and one half-day. The regular days are divided between time spent at the computer labs taking in prerecorded lectures and advancing through a series of quizzes and tests, guided by the pace at which a student can absorb material.
At least three teachers are available to answer questions, work one-on-one as necessary, and otherwise monitor students during this portion of their day. The other half is spent in traditional classrooms with full interaction between teacher and students taking Spanish, art and "enrichment classes" including literature.
Friday, the half-day is spent on a weekly field trip, working on the community service project. Instead of the traditional class groups divided by age, there are four mixed-age groups, which rotate lab and classroom use. According to school staff and officials, the computer-lecture system makes it possible for a seventh grader to be sitting beside a ninth grader and studying the same materials, each according to their learning strengths.
A slower student doesn't have to be feel frustrated by being rushed through a trouble spot, and a faster student doesn't have to become impatient at being held back to an average pace. Students have to achieve a 70 percent or higher score on each quiz to progress.
According to Darling-Greenly, the relative lack of human interaction during lab time is more than made up for during group projects and class time. The time outdoors, working together, seems very important to these kids. They seem to really enjoy the hands-on aspects of learning in this way; the concrete application of science and mix of teamwork, physical activity and relative freedom involved.
"Last Friday, we picked up a whole bunch of trash, a lot of glass bottles and stuff. It was fun," Denton said.
"I like the idea of helping the environment," Allie said. "I want to make the world pretty... not a big trash can."
The biggest two hurdles in the first week, according to both staff and students, have been ironing out computer issues with student log-ons, server crashes and software installation and adjusting to the cramped quarters • the main classroom space is an auditorium divided by soft moveable walls into four quadrants. "Homeroom" consists of a row of wooden bleachers with four paper signs on the back wall assigning students to their class group.
When asked what they'd say to another kid who's thinking of going to SODA, Denton and Robert both say, "Go for it!"
Allie smiles.
"It's fun," she said.
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