Oyster Elementary has a lot to teach its students--and education reformers everywhere.

by Rob Blezard

Photos by Rick Reinhard

At Oyster, all children are taught their subjects in both English and Spanish, and each classroom has two teachers, one for each language.

Washington, D.C.--One frosty Friday in January Gustavo Gatti staked his place on the sidewalk. He was the first parent in a line to register children for the few class slots open to families who live outside the neighborhood boundaries of James F. Oyster Bilingual Elementary School in the city's Woodley Park section.

Three days later when the school's office opened, a total of about 140 parents like Gatti had spent all or part of the weekend waiting for the first-come, first-served sign up.

"It was cold," recalls Gatti, a big, soft-spoken remodeling contractor who lives miles away in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. "There were people out lying on the asphalt or concrete playground in sleeping bags." Some had tents and others slept in their cars. "Everyone did whatever they had to do to be there."

Waiting overnight for out-of-boundary sign-up has been a tradition at Oyster for years, but Gatti's wait in 2001 marked the first time it had lasted more than one night. It's getting worse--in part because Oyster (named for a former school superintendent) opened in a brand new building in 2001, the first new school built in the District of Columbia in 20 years.

This past January the line began forming more than a week ahead of time. The new building is a bonus. Over the years it's been Oyster's intense bilingual immersion program that has compelled parents to wait in the cold night. Oyster teaches all children their subjects in both English and Spanish. The school maintains an even split between Spanish- and English-dominant children, and each classroom has two teachers--one for each language.

"The demand is high for this kind of program," says Gatti, whose children Zöe and Carlos completed a year of kindergarten and pre-kindergarten, respectively, at Oyster in June. The bilingual program is important to Gatti, a native of Paraguay, and his wife, Magali, who is Peruvian.

The top-notch bilingual program at Oyster inspires scores of parents to wait in the freezing cold, but school officials say that the quality affects both sides of the equation. Motivated and enthusiastic parents buoy the school's morale, support the staff and keep educational expectations high. The synergistic partnership between teachers and administrators on the one hand and the parents and children on the other has brought Oyster success beyond most school's dreams.

In the early 1990's, when the school district slated Oyster for closure because there was no money to fix or replace its aging building, the parents took action. They formed the 21st Century School Fund to explore options and put together a creative solution that provided Oyster a new school - and not at taxpayer expense. Under an innovative public-private partnership, Oyster gave about half its property--a good chunk of its playground--to a developer to construct a 211-unit apartment building. In exchange, the developer built a school.

"It was an opportunity that wasn't evident until people looked at it for a while," says William Brenner, vice president for development and director of the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities. "It tells you that good people, when they want to solve a problem, can figure out ways to do it." Oyster's success has led the district's public school system to set policies for similar development partnerships and to carry out a modernization program that will rebuild and replace every school in the city in the next 10 years. The 21st Century School Fund is now working with likeminded groups around the country to bring their creative, community-based, think-outside-the-box approach to other school districts.

Oyster earns the loyalty of parents through its excellent bilingual "immersion" program. Pupils from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade are taught in both Spanish and English by two instructors in each classroom, an English speaker and a Spanish speaker.

In a pre-K class last spring, the instructors were still easing children into the bilingual world, sometimes repeating phrases and words in both languages. In higher grades, the teachers stick to their own language.

"By the time they get to the first grade, when they've been here since pre-K, they really have a lot of language," says Linda Fink, the English-speaking teacher in a first-grade class. In an arrangement typical of the teams, Fink teaches some subjects in English and her partner, Nora Bustios, teaches other subjects in Spanish. But they continually work to cover the material across subject areas.

"We try and do it more by theme," says Fink. "Like if we're studying the weather, we don't just do it at science time, we integrate it."

"We try to make connections all the time," agrees Bustios, who was for many years a teacher in Peru before coming to Oyster in 1997.

By the time students reach the higher grades, they are fully literate in both languages. In one session last May, Eduardo Gamarra's sixth-grade class showed their facility in Spanish as he led pupils in a drill, firing questions in rat-a-tat fashion, keeping them rapt and on the edge of their seats.

An African-American boy wearing jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt was so eager to reply he jumped with every question, contorting his body and lifting himself halfway off his chair just to extend his fingertips a few extra inches. Finally, Gamarra called on him and heard the correct answer.

"Excelente!" Gamarra praised.

Oyster began the dual-language immersion program in 1971 as an alternative way to instruct the children of the many immigrants from Latin America who were moving to the area. The approach sees Spanish proficiency as an asset, a gift to be shared with English-speaking students. By contrast, the more traditional approach, transitioning Spanish-speaking children into all-English classes, implies the language is a liability.

"Why destroy the child's first language just to build up the second?" says Arturo Flores, Oyster's principal. The program gives the Spanish-dominant children cultural validation and continuity in their strong tongue while they learn English. At the same time, it steeps the English-dominant children not only in the Spanish language, but also in culture and customs. The interaction between children of different cultures, backgrounds and economic groups also teaches the children to respect and appreciate differences in people.

"So the children that walk out of here truly have another perspective on life," says Flores. The program became a hit not only among Latino parents and children, but also with English-speaking parents who wanted the experience for their sons and daughters.

"The quality is assumed here," says Steve Cox, an active parent who moved to Oyster's neighborhood so his daughters could go to school there. Cox agrees Oyster's children are much more culturally aware--something his daughter observed when she left Oyster to go to junior high school. "They're the kids who are sitting at a table with people from three or four different ethnic groups and continue to maintain those friendships and those bridges when the rest of the school really kind of divides along ethnic lines or social or class lines."

In addition to its language diversity, Oyster enjoys a mix of ethnicities and economic groups that is unusual for a high-achieving elementary school in the D.C. school district. Oyster is in the top five among the district's 105 elementary schools ranked by standardized test scores, and it is the only one in the top 10 to have a Title I designation--signifying that at least 40 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-cost school lunches. Of its approximately 350 students, 55 percent are Hispanic, 24 percent white, 18 percent African American and 3 percent Asian or Native American.

"We're in the top five, and we're doing two languages. How does that happen?" asks Gloria Rodriguez, assistant principal. She credits the dynamic mixture of community support, parental involvement and teacher enthusiasm--elements that coalesced around Oyster's bilingual immersion program.

"Once this school had a mission and everybody rallied round it, I think that provided the strength," Rodriguez says. The bilingual program energized the school but also reestablished connections between the school and its community.

The school lies in Woodley Park, one of the most well-heeled neighborhoods of Washington--close to National Cathedral, the National Zoo and "Embassy Row"--yet until the bilingual program was started in 1971, the wealthy residents tended to send their children to private schools. As a result, in the 1960's Oyster's boundary was extended into the nearby Adams Morgan neighborhood, home to many Latin American immigrants. In the 1960's, the school enrolled the highest percentage of Hispanics in Washington, recalls Holland. These new parents helped push for the creation of the bilingual program, which then changed the enrollment dynamic.

"Within a year, because of the program, many of the neighborhood kids started going to the school and then it became overcrowded because the building was so small," says Paquita Holland, a native of Puerto Rico who was principal from 1983 to 1988, then from 1991 until her retirement in 2001. The connections between the school and the neighborhoods deepened.

Oyster's program attracted to the school both talented educators and parents with professional skills, vision, expertise and savvy to lead Oyster into bold new areas--including the public-private partnership that gave Oyster a new school. Establishing the strong academic program was the first step. "It sounds really simple," says Rodriguez, "but it's powerful because then you get people who care about everything--the environment, their housing, the community. It seems to me you actually get a true community."

Paradoxically, the high interest in the school is challenging the school's ability to maintain the diversity that is so much a part of Oyster's identity. With more children in the school from the immediate, wealthier neighborhood, the school has been forced to shrink its boundary away from the some of the Latino communities, Holland says. Many feel that this is especially unfair, considering that Latino parents led the establishment of Oyster's innovative bilingual program in the 1970's.

So far, Oyster has been able to maintain its 50-50 split of English-dominant and Spanish-dominant children by accepting children of Latino families as out-of-boundary students. But Oyster's staff worries they may not be able to do it forever. "These are things to think about," says Rodriguez.

Even as Oyster's academic achievement and community spirit soared in the 1970's, its 1920's-vintage brick building deteriorated steadily, and overcrowding forced the district to add portable classrooms.

"The roof had a hole in it; the staircases were dilapidated," recalls Roxane Kovin, a pre-K teacher at Oyster for 25 years. The old building had only one set of bathrooms, no gymnasium, an antiquated electrical system that made upgrades difficult, a temperamental heating system and no air conditioning.

"It wasn't well maintained--repairs weren't done in a timely way," says Mary Filardo, whose first child entered the school in the late 1980's. "It was horrible, actually." Having married into a family with a construction business, Filardo became one of the leaders in organizing parent crews to fix up the school and in pestering the school system for improvements.

"Modest things we were asking for initially," Filardo recalls: windows repaired, the roof fixed, rundown portable classrooms replaced. "And they said no, they didn't have the money. So we figured that there ought to be some way to raise this money. It couldn't be that hard."

Matters came to a crisis in the early 1990's, when the school district slated Oyster to close and its program moved to a larger school.

"We said no, we wouldn't move," says Holland. "We were not going to allow that to happen." The parent-educator network shifted to high gear. "In less than 24 hours, we had organized a press conference where we brought in people from practically all over the country."

Because she was already working on the problems of the physical plant, Filardo became a natural to lead the parent task force. In 1994 she started the 21st Century School Fund that arranged the deal giving Oyster a new school at no cost to taxpayers.

The parents knew the school's property was valuable. Located in one of Washington's most prosperous neighborhoods, the school was also flanked by lucrative commercial structures: apartments on one side and the sprawling Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on the other. In her research, Filardo discovered the playground sat on property zoned high-density residential, which meant that a building with 254,000 square feet could be built on the site. Aware that private-sector developers arranged all sorts of creative deals, she looked into applying that kind of flexibility to Oyster's dilemma.

"It seemed to me the knowledge base needed to do what we had to do did exist, but not in the government sector," Filardo says. The 21st Century School Fund began to act as a mediator between public and private parties to put a deal together.

To pay for the kind of expertise in real estate, architecture and law that the project would require, the fund worked out a deal with the District of Columbia. The school system signed an agreement pledging to give the fund a $250,000 "success fee" if they negotiated a deal, Filardo says. Based on that $250,000 commitment, the fund then secured contracts with the experts in real estate they needed to hammer out an agreement.

In planning the new building for Oyster, the fund developed a grassroots approach that it is now encouraging as a national model. Involving teachers, parents, administrators and community members, the fund wanted a building that would fit Oyster's special program, its educational goals and the needs of the community.

Describing the approach Filardo recalls, "We were saying, 'Are you sure you want that? Do you think you'll want that in five years?'"

The painstakingly devised plan became a reality after the school district selected LCOR Inc. to build the new Oyster School in exchange for land on which the private developer constructed a 211-unit luxury apartment building. The school is financed by a tax-exempt bond of $11 million. For the 35-year life of the bond, LCOR will pay $804,000 a year in lieu of taxes.

"The attraction of Oyster was the quality of the school and the community support to have it succeed," says William Hard, executive vice president and principal of LCOR. "As we look at the entire project, we are pleased as a company."

Oyster's success caused marked reverberations in the District of Columbia.

"Being able to make Oyster happen gave me confidence that the city is ready to tackle its school facility problem," says Sarah Woodhead, deputy director of facilities for the District of Columbia Public Schools. An architect and parent of an Oyster student in the 1990's, Woodhead worked on the Oyster project before she went to work for D.C schools.

"There are parts of the Oyster School project that are a good model for all school projects," Woodhead says. "The community needs to own each project in the same way that Oyster owned its project. Oyster had a clear mission and was very articulate about it."

Using Oyster's financing model, the district has identified a handful of schools that might be fully funded by similar deals, and several others that could be partially funded. The approach may work in other cities facing similar stresses of crumbling schools and low funding.

"For urban systems that are just waking up, it's a piece of the answer," Woodhead says.

The project also debunks the conventional wisdom that smaller schools, although proven to be educationally superior to larger ones, are also more expensive, says Joe Nathan, senior fellow and director of the Center for School Change, connected with the University of Minnesota.

"School districts all over the United States can learn from places like Oyster that are showing how to improve achievement with small schools but without spending more money," Nathan says.

Since the Oyster project, the 21st Century School Fund has worked extensively with the District of Columbia and is now leading a major effort--Building Educational Success Together--to give its community--based model nationwide exposure. Partnering with groups such as Chicago's Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, New Jersey's Education Law Center and Ohio's KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the 21st Century School Fund will encourage community residents and local governments to work together to solve school--building problems.

"They're offering a process, I would say, of enabling people to build better schools by thinking of some new ways to do that," says Brenner, of the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities. Many in the Oyster community agree that the approach is noteworthy.

"This is the sort of thing that we ought to systematize and bottle and market and take to a lot of other places around the country," says Steve Cox. "It started with a community committed to having quality bilingual education. If you can start to get a community focused on these things and imagining what is possible, you can do this in some other places, too."

The exterior of the new James F. Oyster School has some of the early--20th--century charm of the old school. Tall rectangular windows with tidy white trim peer out from a red--brick façade. Pillars support a portico over the main entrance, and a cupola crowns the slanted roofline.

Inside, the school is bright and airy. Light pours in from the windows and gleams off pale yellow walls and luminous white tile floors accented by squares in primary colors. Creating rooms inside the wedge--shaped building, architects avoided the monotony of white blocks.

"There isn't a classroom in that place that's a box or a rectangle," says Holland. "They all have little walls and nooks and crannies and break--out places and diagonal walls. It's just beautiful." Recalling the bottlenecks that formed at the water fountains and bathrooms of the old school, the new building has a water fountain in every classroom and lavatories for every two.

The new school has a smaller schoolyard, but there is now a gymnasium and a host of other amenities that make life easier for children and teachers alike.

"It's gorgeous," says Roxane Kovin, the pre--K teacher. "We have parent rooms, we have a special music room, a gym, a cafeteria and multipurpose room. We've got spaces for everything and everybody."

The building meets everyone's needs because everyone was involved in its design. "It was fun having a say in what we thought was important to go into the building," Kovin adds.

Despite its new building, the Oyster community keeps a clear perspective on what is really vital to a healthy school.

"The new building is nice, but that isn't the program," says Frank Miele, the principal who developed Oyster's dual--language immersion program in the 1970's. "The program is the people. The people are competent and they have high standards."