What About Wilson?

This weekend I will be hopping on an airplane to fly to Mesa, Arizona. Besides the opportunity to leave a cold and wintery Provo in exchange for some sunshine, the thing that draws me to this city is Zaharis Elementary School. This is the 4^th time this school has lured me to empty my pockets for air fare and a hotel reservation. Perhaps this sounds like an odd tourist destination, but for nerdy educators like myself, it is one of the most exciting places to go! This school is renowned for its style. The walls are covered in murals that have been painted by students, the classrooms have tree houses and castles to provide a fun space for reading, and the overall atmosphere is exciting.

Teachers at Zaharis use a unique inquiry-based instruction method inquiry-based instruction method where they expect students to have real life experiences. For example, the kindergartners manage a lemonade stand during recess – earning money for their classrooms while practicing their math skills at the same time. A retired engineer helps 6^th graders develop a capstone project - one of which involved a group of girls skyping with NASA to ask questions about their STEM project. Another young 3^rd grade girl wrote to the newspaper explaining her feelings on the injustice of aquariums and begging the local exhibit to free the aquatic life.

While this school really is doing amazing things, just down the road from them, within the same school district, is Wilson elementary school. When I first visited Mesa, I was with a group of student teachers from BYU-Idaho. We were touring multiple schools in the Mesa School District. While the principal at Zaharis had been there for seventeen years and people were coming from all over the world to gawk at his success, Wilson elementary has a brand-new principle who was the fifth one within a three-year time span. Wilson elementary was struggling to retain their accreditation, and this new principal was sort of a last chance effort at making that happen. As we visited classrooms, students seemed off the wall – especially in juxtaposition to the perfectly behaved students at Zaharis. We could not get out of there fast enough.

In our naïve student teacher candidate minds, we thought Wilson Elementary was a total dump. As we loaded back on the bus, conversations raved about how Wilson Elementary just needed to simply adopt the same model as Zaharis and all their problems would melt away. Almost everyone left that weekend wanting to student teach at Zaharis – a coveted location for BYU-Idaho students to student teach – but no one left aspiring to student teach at Wilson.

Three years later, I had the privilege of student teaching at Zaharis – a dream come true. I truly loved my experience there and had so much fun teaching those students. However, I learned some things during this time that my naïve sophomore college self did not realize. First off, I did not realize that Zaharis Elementary was located in one of the wealthiest areas of Mesa. I also did not realize that, despite Mesa having a demographic of 30% Hispanic students (Mesa demographics), this demographic would not be represented by Zaharis. 

In fact, because I was receiving my minor in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), I had to include an opportunity to tutor an English Language Learner. Out of the entire school, there was one first grade girl that had just moved in that year, that was classified as an English Language Learner. While this one girl saved me from having to transfer schools in search of an ELL, another teacher candidate from my program was teaching at a school just a few minutes from me and mentioned that over half of her class did not speak English fluently.

As stated previously, I loved student teaching at Zaharis. But what about Wilson? What about the students there that are struggling to speak English, that have teachers and principals quit on them commonly, and that continue to be told they aren't worth it? Even I, who studied TESOL in an effort to help ELL’s, was more drawn to a school that had more resources, better behaved students, and higher prestige. Unfortunately, this is a common trend among educators and adds to the inequity of our education system. 

I wonder what would happen to the other schools in the Mesa school district if resources were divvied out more evenly to low-income areas. I wonder if more schools would have the opportunity to adopt some of Zaharis’ teaching strategies. I wonder if high-quality teachers would choose to work for the schools that need it the most. I wonder if the already underprivileged students would gain more privilege, because their education system would give them a chance. I wonder what positive changes would happen for the students at Wilson.