photo: Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer
Campus International School students participate in morning stretching exercises Thursday. From left are Nyja Grays, Dion Sorrells, Greyson Hankins and Isaiah Payne.
story : Thomas Ott, The Plain Dealer
A new Cleveland school opened Thursday, easing its first students into a program that will supplement the basics with Mandarin Chinese.
The Campus International School, a joint venture between the school district and Cleveland State University, welcomed 60 first- and second-graders a week before most other city students resume classes. Sixty kindergartners will arrive Wednesday, bringing the school to capacity.
About a fourth of the students come from the suburbs.
Campus International, the latest addition to the district’s “innovation” portfolio, will grow by a grade each year until it extends through high school. It’s in leased classrooms at the former First United Methodist Church, on Euclid Avenue at East 30th Street, but officials hope to move eventually to a building at the neighboring university.
The school will emphasize world culture, instilling a global perspective in children whose experiences sometimes don’t reach the shore of Lake Erie. Students in the lower grades will learn some Mandarin, though the school does not expect them to speak it fluently.
CSU President Ronald Berkman said Campus International can test new teaching methods while helping to rejuvenate areas neighboring the university. Kindergarten teacher Daniel Ogilvy likes being part of a program that’s just getting started and fits his style of instruction.
“Trying to use education to make the world a better place was always something I’ve tried to do in my classroom,” said Ogilvy, who previously taught pre-kindergarten at Memorial Elementary School in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood.
Berkman pushed for the school after being hired in April 2009, but it didn’t gain momentum until early this year, a turnaround so sudden that renovation still needs finishing touches. The university has agreed to pay for facilities, while the school district pays most of the staff.
Principal Julie Beers, formerly principal of Noble Elementary School in Cleveland Heights, signed on in April. She said the chance to be the school’s first leader and collaborate with the university drew her to the job.
The school has six classroom teachers, a full-time physical education teacher and part-time specialists in art, music and media. It is bringing in two teachers of Mandarin Chinese, the school’s initial foreign language offering.
Christine Fowler-Mack, the school district’s chief of staff, recruited the teacher from Beijing in July, during a trip financed by Hanban/Confucius Institute Headquarters. The agency, affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education, will pay the teacher’s salary.
Campus International is applying for International Baccalaureate accreditation, a distinction belonging to only a few Northeast Ohio schools. The process has just begun and will take up to two years.
Campus International students will visit Cleveland State University laboratories and recreation facilities. Meanwhile, CSU students from different majors will come to the public school for purposes such as student teaching, research, giving speech and hearing tests or conducting psychological assessments.
Ronald Abate, an associate professor of teacher education, has taken a one-year sabbatical to serve as a full-time liaison to the school. His main job is developing the curriculum, but anything is game.
“I like to say my principal responsibility is ‘other duties as assigned,’ literally what needs to get done,” Abate, pronounced ah-bah-tay, said Thursday. “Last night we were wiping off the tables in the cafeteria.”
Beers and Abate scrambled to recruit students but now have a waiting list that stands at 20.
Cleveland, which has an open-enrollment policy and hopes to attract more out-of-district students to its innovation schools, gets state aid for the suburban students that would have otherwise gone to each child’s home district.
Christopher Sedlock of Garfield Heights, associate athletic director at Cleveland State, hovered at the school Thursday morning before kissing his 6-year-old son, Adam, goodbye.
Sedlock said he and his wife wanted a school that would challenge Adam, a first-grader who is reading at an advanced level. He said he was impressed by teachers who exhibit a “genuine interest in teaching and learning.”
“You want the best fit for your kids,” Sedlock said. “We’re confident that Cleveland State’s resources and the staff they’ve assembled here is the right combination.”
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