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Rarely does a new crop of kindergartners provoke so much interest, but Encinal’s youngest students have almost mini-celebrity status at the Menlo Park City School District’s elementary school.
“A lot of the bigger kids were glued to the fence at lunch, looking at the little kids,” said Encinal Principal Allison Liner.
Up until this year, Encinal in Atherton has been home to the district’s third- through fifth-graders who live east of El Camino Real. All that changed on Aug. 25 when about 100 youngsters started their first day of school in the campus’ spanking new kindergarten wing. As this kindergarten class advances through the grades, Encinal will become a K-5 school.
The older students are so enthusiastic about having kindergartners on campus, the school is planning to offer them a variety of volunteer opportunities to work with the kindergarteners, Ms. Liner said.
“We’re so happy to have kindergarteners at Encinal,” she said. “Little kids are so curious, so excited about learning, it really brings a new warmth to our school.”
Another first for the entire Menlo Park district is happening in two of Encinal’s five kindergarten classrooms — the launch of a bilingual Spanish immersion program. Students of Maestra Maria and Senorita Barerra were asked, in Spanish, to bid “adios” to their anxiously hovering parents on the first day of school.
The teachers speak only Spanish to their students, amounting to about 90 percent of the total instruction in the kindergarten year. That percentage will slip downward as students progress through the program, leveling out at 50 percent English and 50 percent Spanish spoken in the classroom by fifth grade, when district officials say children should be fluent and literate in both languages.
“The kids seem to be adapting very well,” Principal Liner said. “I’m happy to say nobody was crying and everybody was playing nicely.”
Kids in the immersion class won’t be the only ones learning Spanish at school this year. The district’s world language initiative is making Spanish instruction part of the curriculum for grades 3-5 at all three elementary schools, with plans to expand it to sixth grade and primary grades, said Superintendent Ken Ranella.
Other curriculum changes are in the offing, as district officials assess new mathematics textbooks and figure out how to prepare students for a state mandate to teach algebra to every eighth grader, Mr. Ranella said. Currently, about 60 percent of the district’s eighth-graders take algebra, he said. The district is collaborating with the Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative on professional development, studies and strategies, he said.
With district enrollment climbing, getting all those kids to school is a big issue. Primary grade students can take the district’s new school bus to Laurel and Encinal in the mornings at a cost of $250 for the year. After school, the bus is used to take children to the Newton after-school child care program on the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church campus. Other options include SamTrans routes geared toward older students, carpool message boards set up on school Web sites, and shuttles to ferry kids from Encinal to Laurel, providing one-stop pick-ups for families with siblings at both schools.
This year’s big push to reduce the number of cars bringing kids to school seems to be a big hit. Mr. Ranella said that Oak Knoll needs more racks to handle the unexpectedly large numbers of bicycles, and that there’s been a good deal of interest in the school bus. Construction projects starting this fall on the Encinal and Oak Knoll campuses are expected to exacerbate traffic and parking problems.
“I think the parent(s) here are supporting our initiative of getting cars off the roads and away from campuses, not only because of the construction, but from a general ethic about being green,” Mr. Ranella said.
Future construction at Hillview Middle School on Santa Cruz Avenue is bound to be another big topic this year, as the district prepares for the public review of the project’s environmental impact report this fall. Enrollment at the middle school is expected to jump 25 percent in the next few years, triggering a major reconfiguration of the campus.
The district is also facing some changes at the top. Two veteran school board members, Terry Thygesen and board President Bruce Ives, are departing after eight years. Two candidates have filed to fill their seats, Maria Hilton and Mark Box. Both are past chairs of the Menlo Park-Atherton School Foundation.
Among many other topics, the school board will be weighing whether to have a laptop computers for each student at the middle-school level, Mr. Ranella said. This year is the first that all classrooms are equipped with Smart Boards, a type of interactive whiteboard that links to computers or projectors.
“All the staff has had initial training on it,” Mr. Ranella said. “I was gratified to walk into a kindergarten class at Laurel, and see the children all sitting on the rug and the teacher was putting up stuff on the Smart Board.”
All in all, it looks to be another busy year in the Menlo Park school district.
“The mantra here is: ‘continuous improvement,'” said Mr. Ranella. “From the board to the administration, the teachers and staff, we know we’re going to continuously improve in all areas, especially in curriculum, but also in operations.”
MENLO PARK CITY SCHOOL DISTRICT
Superintendent: Kenneth Ranella | Call 321-7140 | www.mpcsd.org
Enrollment: 2,418.
• Laurel (K-2), 95 Edge Road, Atherton | Principal: Nancy Hendry | Call 324-0186.
• Oak Knoll (K-5), 1895 Oak Knoll Lane, Menlo Park | Principal: David Ackerman | Call 854-4433
• Encinal (K, 3-5), 195 Encinal Ave., Atherton | Principal: Allison Liner | Call 326-5164
• Hillview (6-8), 1100 Elder Ave., Menlo Park | Principal: Michael Moore | Call 326-4341
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