In January, we started collaborating with the International Preparatory Academy, a bilingual school in its first year that is currently sharing a building with Kenwood Elementary. Kenwood’s own building is having construction done this year, so they and IPA share the old Carey Busey building and IPA will expand into the rest of the building when Kenwood leaves next year.
Now that I actually write that all down, it’s kind of complicated. But the upshot is that IPA is an entirely separate school that happens to be in the same building as Kenwood – they have their own teachers, principal, equipment, everything. However, Kids Plus, the after-school program in the building, takes students from both Kenwood and IPA, and we have a portion of registration reserved for Kids Plus students.
One day during second quarter, Diogenes (not his real name) was having trouble getting logged into Scratch, and I couldn’t find his credentials. That’s because I only have access to Kenwood records, and Diogenes is an IPA student. So I went to find an IPA teacher to help, and ran into a faculty meeting. When I explained the situation, one of the teachers asked, “Wait, IPA kids can come to Tech Time?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said without thinking. Further discussion revealed that we actually had a lot of groundwork to do, but we decided to work together on it. In third quarter, we started taking a few IPA students from one each week, and in fourth quarter we’ll be opening up registration to IPA at large. Mr. Kotowski has been hard at work preparing translations of our forms and policies, and Mrs. Tidemann has lent us her iPads for K-1 Mondays so that we can do Scratch, Jr. and Kodable activities. Mrs. Tidemann is also starting her own Code Club, and I’ve agreed to help her with the design of it, which will help to establish a more sustainable (i.e. not grant-funded) program for the building.
All in all, it’s been a wonderfully constructive experience, and I can’t wait to see how fourth quarter goes!
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