On Student Behavior: “The entire staff came together as a group to collaborate and develop our own personalized positive behavior support system—which we call ‘Superkids’—and as a result, the entire school climate has changed. Positive behaviors are being rewarded, recognized on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis and disruptive behavior is down, non-productive behavior is down, so there are more opportunities for on-task learning behaviors.”
On Managing for Results: “We have a summer school program which is a summer enrichment program and we do our own pre- and post-test based on our focus, which is vocabulary development. If we don’t see any improvement with a program, then we don’t do it. We track the data for everything we do and that’s what’s changed.”
On Outcomes: “We spend a lot of time on practical outcomes. What is the problem? What can we do? What do we need to do? Let’s try something. Let’s see how that works. Let’s try something else. And we keep coming back to the same topic: What can we do to help our kids achieve?”
Jaime Balisciano, Teacher
On Professional Development: “How many professional developments do you go to and you’re presented with two hours of material and then the person walks away and you go your own way. So one thing is the constantly revisiting and constantly communicating the vision and the goal and we want to do as a school with the staff.”
On the Basics: “After many, many hours of analyzing data, we decided that there were two initiatives that we really wanted to concentrate on. One was in reading and one was in math.”
Diane Melillo, Literacy Specialist
On Best Practices: “It’s not just a workshop. ‘Go ahead and go try this’. It’s having someone come here and work with your own children. Because you go to a workshop and you’re thinking ‘This is just great, but they don’t know my children; they don’t know the type of child that I work with; they don’t know my needs; they don’t know that I have 25 children in my classroom.’”
On Reading Strategies: “The Haskins model has worked at Church Street. A lot of my time has been devoted to infusing those strategies among different grade levels.”
Location: 95 Church Street 
On Student Behavior: 
On Professional Development:
On Best Practices: