Sue Sitter/PCT With noises from lunch prep and gym class in the background, instructional aide Lou Anne Leer helps students with a reading lesson.
Staff and students at Ely Elementary School led members of the public on tours of the school recently in an effort to illustrate the need for expanding the campus.
Fifth grader Autumn Gullickson and sixth grader Emma Shively led one tour with help from Travis Risovi, school counselor and Angela Hager, multi-tier support specialist at the school. Gullickson and Shively said they had been designated “school ambassadors.”
“It gets very crowded a lot of times,” Shively explained as the small group of tourists navigated a narrow hallway. “It’s very crowded in the halls. Sometimes, when we go to lunch, there’s a whole line going all the way around the corner.”
Students walking down the hallway every day pass rooms formerly used for storage and office space. They’re now used for small group instruction, counseling and other student services.
Risovi paused to look into a small room. “That actually was a classroom up until this year, but we needed a room for intervention,” he said.
School instructional and counseling staff take an all-hands-on-deck approach to helping students who struggle with reading and math, Risovi said. He helps a small group with their reading in his counseling office at a small table near his desk.
Even the school cafeteria doubles as classroom space. A small group practiced vowel sounds at a table in the lunchroom with instructional aide Lou Anne Leer as workers prepared lunch in the background. Noises from the gym came from a few feet away.
About 20 first graders exercised in the small, windowless gym. Students who needed to run negotiated their way around each other find space. “Could you imagine what this looks like when a class of older kids are in here?” Risovi asked.
“Keep in mind, this is going on when our reading groups are in session,” Hager noted. “And sometimes, we have to find other spaces to work with small groups,” she added, pointing to an entryway near the gym that sometimes doubles as a small classroom.
Doorways ‘our last resort’
“Right now, they’re working with kindergarteners. Shortly, it’ll be first second and third grade. We have to push this table into this doorway and put a screen up. This is our last resort place. We’ve had two different teachers have to do this,” Hager said.
“When the temperatures are below zero, we keep our groups away from the doors,” Hager added. “But then, you’re closer to this,” she said, pointing to the noisy gym.
“Our basketball court is so small, we don’t have our games here. We have to go to the armory or the high school,” Shively said. “Sometimes, they already have games there. If we get a bigger gym, it will have a stage so when we have our plays, we can have them here instead of the high school.”
Shively said she sings in the choir at Ely. Gullickson plays in the band.
“We have to go to Rugby High (for concerts),” Gullickson said. “We have our plays there, too. Every year we have one and we have to keep going back and forth to practice and stuff.”
The group passed a former storage closet now used as a quiet space for students with special needs.
Special Education Teacher Dana Thoreson showed two other small rooms used for instruction, speech and other services.
She said the rooms are “used for individual reading groups and used for individual math groups. We also have students who struggle with regulating their behaviors and their emotions. We have students needing sensory breaks because of sensory issues. We have that set up as well. So, we juggle between these two,” Thoreson added.
The walls of one room display cards with words on them. One wall has cards with different genres of books on them; another has mindsets and mental strategies for students.
Down the hallway, the school psychologist’s office doubles as a space to help children struggling with handwriting. Teacher Alyson Schepp gives the lessons three times a week.
In Khloe Sobolik’s second grade classroom, children sit on the carpet for reading and group lessons. Hager said younger children need to sit on the floor sometimes to allow them to stretch and move.
“You’ll notice they don’t have very big carpet areas,” Hager said.
Hager showed how Ely kindergarten teachers have carved out space in their classrooms by clustering desks to make room for small tables for reading and math help and carpet areas for other activities.
As she paused in the doorway of Miriah Yoder’s first grade classroom, Hager said, “Notice how crowded her desk is. There’s another carpet area in the back where students can read quietly.”
“She has a kidney-shaped table that can fit three kids comfortably for small groups in reading and math,” Hager added. “If a teacher sees certain kids are struggling with a concept, they can pull them back to the table and work with them individually. Those are all things teachers don’t want to give up. They have more space if they give them up, but they lose that activity area for other lessons. Some people are questioning why teachers need all that stuff. Well, there is a purpose for everything. They have to have these things.”
Hager then led the group to the library. “Our library used to have books all over. We needed space, so we cut down on the number of books.”
Books taken from library
Hager and Risovi noted 3,000 books were eliminated from the library to make room for instructional materials needed for small group lessons.
Reading intervention lessons take place until 11:20, when library time begins.
“We pull out about 50 kids in grades one through six,” Hager said. “In kindergarten, all of them are broken into groups and classroom teachers do it as well, but our interventionists go in and help.”
Hager and the other tour guides peeked into fifth and sixth grade classrooms. At the end of the hallway near a staircase, Ashley Blikre told her sixth graders to pair up to solve a math problem. Students found space wherever they could near large drawings done for another school project.
“We’ve got 19 bodies in here,” Blikre said, adding, “This room used to be the computer lab, then it got converted to a classroom four years ago. I was a computer teacher, then, due to class sizes, we needed to turn it into a classroom.”
Across the hallway, Andee Mattson conducted a music lesson. Several children sang aloud. “I’d like to keep my door open,” Blikre said with a smile. “I don’t like to close it, but I need to.”
Across the street, a modular classroom building provides space for the school’s Lego League team, annual parent meetings for individual educational programs in special education and choir practice.
“I can’t imagine how the acoustics must be in here,” Risovi said.
Hager said students using the building in winter must bundle up before they leave the main school building to cross the street, then bundle up again to return. “This loses instructional time,” she said.
Even with the modular building, there’s still little room for storage. Desks, office supplies and other equipment are kept in sheds outside of the main school building.
However, Hager said she was glad the school could carve out just a little extra space for learning in the portable building. “Just having these two extra rooms is still helpful, even if we don’t have a classroom over here. We still use this modular every single day.”
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Ely students, staff invite public to tour crowded school - Pierce County Tribune
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