Frist praises Project Grad program
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“I think we all find it the funnest thing in math,” 6-year-old Katryn Faller told senator as she worked a subtraction problem with yellow blocks while he looked over her shoulder.
“They all look like fun,” the heart surgeon-turned-politician told the eager pupils in Beth Blevin’s first-grade class at Beaumont Elementary Magnet School.
“To add and subtract, that is important,” said Frist, a Tennessee Republican. “I am a doctor and to be a doctor I had to know a lot of math. Some of ya’ll should become a doctor.”
A public-private education program called Project Grad has been adopted by all of Knoxville’s inner city schools — 10 elementary schools and two middle schools serving some 7,500 students.
The result: Students are working “on a higher level than they ever had before,” Blevins said.
Knoxville is the 10th city in the country and the first in Tennessee to adopt the Houston-based Project Grad model. The program combines phased-in curriculums and hands-on materials to improve discipline, reading and math with help of tutors, social workers and scholarships.
The U.S. Department of Education underwrites about a quarter of the program’s cost of about $452 per child. Private donations from groups such as the Ford Foundation and the Frist Foundation, which was created by the senator’s family, provide another quarter. Local governments pay the rest.
“It is the best program I have seen to come along,” said Sam Anderson, chairman and 16-year member of the Knox County Board of Education. “It is the one that I think has a chance to be successful because it understands a component of a child’s life is outside the school.”
The kindergarten-to-eighth grade program emphasizes self-discipline in the first year. Children are given responsibility in small doses — lunch line monitors, calling roll — and they learn “to discipline each other,” Anderson said.
With the aid of “campus managers” who act like social workers helping students with life at home as well as at school, children can more easily focus on school work. “And once you get the distractions out of the classroom, kids can achieve,” Anderson said.
The Knoxville schools are in the second year of the program, in which the math curriculum is introduced. Next year will come the reading program, but educators say they already are seeing results.
“The classrooms are noisier than they were,” said third grade teacher Susan Mann. “But it is a good chaos. It is a productive chaos because the kids are thinking and engaging in the discussion.”
President Bush cited the Project Grad program in Knoxville as an example of his No Child Left Behind initiative during a visit in January.
“To see it in action, to see them working hands-on, … (it) gives me a great deal of pleasure,” Frist said. “I see in the faces of these young children — here today from as diverse a background as anywhere in the state of Tennessee — I see future physicians and future scientists.”
Other cities with Project Grad programs, now offered in 220 schools with 135,000 students nationwide: Houston and Brownsville, Texas; Columbus, Akron and Cincinnati, Ohio; Atlanta; Roosevelt, N.Y.; Newark, N.J., and Kenai Peninsula, Alaska.
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On the Net:
Project Grad: http://www.projectgradusa.org/