Bigger APPLE urged

After years of waiting for a piece of the APPLE, parents on a waiting list for the coveted Spokane Public Schools parent-cooperative program finally may get a slice.

District staff recommended adding an APPLE classroom at Franklin Elementary School next year, and possibly one class each year until there are six full grades.

The Alternative Parent Participating Learning Experience requires parents to volunteer at least 90 hours of their time at school and is one of two alternative programs available to elementary students in the district.

School staff also gave a green light to expanding the district’s Montessori program at Jefferson Elementary School. Montessori, based on a method of instruction centered on independent learning, is also offered to students in grades one through six at Balboa Elementary School.

APPLE is the more popular of the district’s two programs, helping about 150 students between Franklin on the South Hill and Garfield Elementary School on the North Side. Each school has three rooms, divided into first- and second-grade, third- and fourth-grade, and fifth- and sixth-grade combination classrooms.

An APPLE program at Logan Elementary was closed in 2003.

“APPLE creates this incredible community of families,” said Franklin APPLE parent Christa Arguinchona. “The community we create here is the biggest draw for me.”

While APPLE classrooms look like most classrooms – abuzz with quiet chatter, the rustling of book pages and the familiar “scratch, scratch, scratch” of pencils on paper – it’s the parents’ cooperation that makes them different.

Parents organize field trips, volunteer in the class, sit on committees that direct learning and organize an annual auction that benefits the entire school community where it is housed, not just APPLE.

Students that start APPLE in the first grade stay with the same group of kids all the way through sixth grade.

“As teachers, not only do we have long-term relationships with students, but entire families,” said Beth Calkins, who teaches the first- and second-grade APPLE class at Franklin.

“These are parents that want to be involved. That’s the rock-bottom basis for what this is all about.”

The expansion would mean a full first-grade classroom for the Franklin APPLE families this year, and access for parents who have been on a waiting list, sometimes as long as four years, to be a part of the program.

Students are selected based on a lottery, and siblings of students already accepted to the program are automatically selected for open slots, narrowing the opportunities for other families to participate.

“For years they have been turning away families and saying, ‘We have something really great here and we know you want it, but sorry,’ ” Calkins said. “This is going to be a big change for all of us.”

They usually have space for about 16 new first-graders each year, but those spots are taken by siblings. Without the expansion, there would have been room for five new students next year – one girl and four boys.

“Now we get to take 16,” Calkins said.

Garfield, which typically has lower enrollment numbers than the Franklin program, will still have three classes. In addition, the North Side program also must fill up before the district will complete the Franklin expansion and hire an additional teacher.

“With declining enrollment in our schools, we are trying to reduce teaching staff,” mostly through attrition, said Nancy Stowell, assistant superintendent.

District officials said previous expansion requests had been turned down because of concerns over funding for teachers, space and how the programs would adversely affect the school’s eligibility to receive grants based on poverty.

Because the program historically has drawn families with higher income levels, more of those students in the program could lower Franklin’s percentage of students taking free and reduced-cost lunch, which currently is about 53 percent.

Based on that figure, the school qualifies for Learning Assistance Program funds that pay for an instructional coach who works with students in need of remediation in literacy.

“Any future expansion may affect that (free-and-reduced lunch) percentage,” Principal Mary Seeman said. “If it drops, it could cost our building that coach.”

The lottery the APPLE program uses does not allow the school to determine the diversity of the group, aside from gender, an issue that in the past has drawn criticism.

In recent years, however, district officials have worked hard to recruit diverse families to take an interest in the program.

In 2005, Franklin APPLE had a population made up of 81 percent Caucasian students, 3.8 percent Native American, 5 percent African American. 2.6 percent Asian, and 4.3 Hispanic, Stowell said.

The district average is 85 percent white students.

“APPLE has been a very positive experience that really benefits the entire district,” Stowell said.