Bravo, Bessemer
By Peter Strescino

November 26, 1998

Welcome to the spotlight, Bessemer Elementary. Everyone wants to know just how you did it. Everybody wants to be seen with you. They’re all dropping your name in polite society.

Bessemer Elementary is hot. The school that was known in 1997 for test scores that resembled an overnight low in Anchorage – and as the District 60 school with the highest mobility rate – is now known as the little school that did.

What it did was raise its Colorado Student Assessment Program scores higher than any school in the state. What it has is a group of fifth-grade students who so increased their scores in math, reading and writing that they earned the school $8,000 in incentive awards.

People are suddenly flocking to the redbrick school at Mesa and Routt. People like Paul Harvey are talking about Bessemer on national radio; USA Today is mentioning the scores in its column; TV news anchors spout happy talk about Bessemer; and northern Colorado newspapers sing Bessemer’s praises and wonder aloud why their own schools can’t improve as much.

School contingents from Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, the San Luis Valley and other Pueblo schools regularly visit just to see how Bessemer students suddenly saw the light.

The principal of Horizon Middle School from Aurora came down, watched Bessemer teachers and students at work, then donated $350 to the school.

"Everyone wants to know what we did," said Bessemer teacher Rita Marquez. "We tell them there’s no magic bullet."

But there’s magic at Bessemer. The teachers there say it’s called hard work and getting back to basics.

"We weren’t slacking off before," said teach Rhonda Holcomb. "We just weren’t teaching the right way, not teaching the things kids needed."

Marquez said that in her heart she was against many new education initiatives, not because she thought the ideas were so bad, but that the innovations discounted the good parts of education used in the past.

"I thought there was something wrong with me," she said of her beliefs. "But we got too far away from basics."

Holcomb said that new Principal Gary Trujillo has added a firmer discipline to the mix, and the groups of visitors to the school have remarked about the quiet and the intensity of the classes.

Tuesday, the school was awarded $8,000 from a consortium of local foundations and the El Pomar Foundation. The local benefactors were the Pueblo Hispanic Education Foundation, the Farly Foundation, Kelly-Ducy Foundations, Thatcher Foundation and the Pueblo Chieftain Publisher Robert Rawlings’ Rawlings Foundation.

The school earned $5,000 because its scores rose so dramatically on the CSAP tests, and $3,000 more because its current fifth-grade class raised its scores in the Terra Nova tests 150 percent in reading, 800 percent in writing and almost 300 percent in math.

To add to the momentum, Bessemer has become one of the few schools nationally selected to use the Lindamood-Bell reading method. Although previously a largely clinical method, LmB is drawing raves from Bessemer teachers and District 60 administrators.

"Two days after I saw Lindamood-Bell in practice, I knew that was the missing piece here," said Marquez. "This isn’t just another new program; it’s so complete there is no reason that a child can’t learn to read using it."

She said Lindamood-Bell is an "auditory, visual, kinetic" method of learning how to read.

"I’ll never teach without Lindamood-Bell again," Marquez said.

Although a great deal of her time recently has been coordinating the schedules at Bessemer for the groups that now flock there and doing other public relations work for the school, she is language are and math resource coordinator there.

The Bessemer teachers were devastated when the 1997 test results were announced. They had some loud closed-door meetings and regrouped.

"We were being made fun of before," Holcomb said of the low scores of 1997.

"This is much nicer attention," Marquez said.

But the staff realizes that with all of the positive attention and praise will come more scrutiny when the next tests are taken in the spring.

"Our expectation are very high now," Marquez said. "Our expectation are at another level."