Six months after becoming the first fully authorized International Baccalaureate World School in the state, Wade King Elementary’s support from community members is growing steadily. “We’ve had an overwhelming endorsement from the families who are attending here,” said Principal Rob McElroy. “We have many elements families want for their kids.”
There are currently 420 students attending Wade King, he said, and over 100 of those students are from outside the Samish neighborhood.
The Primary Years program, part of the program designed for kids ages 3 to 12, focuses on allowing students to take control of their own education by letting them decide what they want to learn about.
“The kids realize that they are in charge of their own learning,” said Teresa Werner, co-president of the PTA, a substitute teacher and parent. She said her daughter came home from kindergarten one day and decided she needed a ‘wonder wall’, a place for her to post questions and be encouraged to find the answers on her own. “One of her questions on the board right now is ‘Is a coconut a fruit or a nut?’” Werner said.
Wade King opened in 2008 and participated in the rigorous, two year authorization process until being accepted into the program in July 2010.
There are currently 245 International Baccalaureate schools in the country, ranging from elementary to high school, but only one in Washington. Northern Heights Elementary School, in the Barkley neighborhood, is a candidate IB school and will follow in Wade King’s footsteps if they are accepted into the program in the spring.
The inquiry-based program lets kids study any subject they want as long as it falls under a certain category. For example, if the second graders are learning about life cycles, one student could choose to study the life cycle of a butterfly, while another student could decide to learn about fish.
The IB program has developed a learner profile that details the kind of person a student should become to be able to change the world, McElroy said. “All of our programs and projects lead towards this learner profile, using inquiry as our mechanism of learning,” he said.
“I think we are going to see an expansion of the IB program in the future in Washington state,” McElroy said.
Because it is a public school, Wade King has the same standards as other public elementary schools, he said. The kids enter middle school knowing all the same material that other children know, but they also have the knowledge of other cultures and other people, McElroy said.
Fifth graders are required to set up an exhibition that demonstrates their understanding of the key points of the Primary Years Program and how it will benefit them in the future. Project ideas could range from addressing homelessness in the area to evaluating the nutrition of the cafeteria food.
The school’s mission statement starts out similar to other schools, McElroy said, focusing on knowledge and developing self-sufficient children. But then it goes on to say they want to develop kids who are going to change the world.
“We are focused on helping kids understand a culture that is vastly different from theirs,” McElroy said.
To do this, every student at Wade King is learning Mandarin in some form or another. The school chose this as its second language because many Asian countries are becoming major leaders in today’s society and will continue to do so in the future, McElroy said.
It absolutely helps that all the kids in the school are learning the same language, Werner said. The library holds an extensive Mandarin collection that the students can check out and take home. To encourage parents to get involved too, the school occasionally holds Mandarin workshops so they can speak Mandarin at home with their children.
In choosing the IB program over other programs, McElroy said he “tried to anticipate what the world will be like when these kids graduate in 2020.”
Bulletin boards around the school highlight student’s real-world contributions to the community, McElroy said.
“I like the expectation that kids take meaningful action based on what they’re learning,” said Tiffany Gutierrez, a 4th grade teacher at Wade King. She said her students are currently working on raising money for the impoverished children in Pakistan and Afghanistan after reading Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea.” Mortenson is speaking at Skagit Valley College in the next couple weeks and she said several of her students are planning to attend.
Werner, being the co-president of the PTA, interacts with many parents on a daily basis. “I am always pleasantly surprised how similar our children’s experiences are,” she said. “It’s not just my child.”
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