Innovative clubs make staying after school fun

Many students want to go home as soon as the dismissal bell rings. But leaving school is the last thing on students’ minds every Thursday at one Wake County elementary school.

Nearly all of the 840 students at Barwell Road Elementary in Southeast Raleigh stay after school each Thursday to take part in clubs such as running, LEGO construction, robotics, the art of handwriting and step club. The weekly clubs are getting noticed and could be offered at some of the 10 other Wake schools that, like Barwell, have been given flexibility to act more like charter schools to try to raise student performance.

“They’re not just hammering more drill and kill,” Wake Superintendent Jim Merrill told school board members last week. “There are a lot of exciting activities that are going on.”

Barwell was given flexibility in setting its calendar and spending state money because the school has been labeled as low-performing for two of the past three years. Last school year, the school had a passing rate of 42.7 percent on state exams. Nearly 80 percent of Barwell’s students received subsidized lunches and 93 percent of the enrollment were minority students.

Barwell and Walnut Creek Elementary School, also in Southeast Raleigh, have used this new flexibility – known as the restart model – to add 10 more school days to the calendar this school year. Those two extra weeks of school, called learning symposiums, revolve around offering non-traditional learning activities.

Barwell also used the flexibility to begin offering after-school clubs each Thursday from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. School usually ends at 3:45 p.m., but on Thursday Barwell can extend its school day and use its state dollars to pay teachers to work with the clubs. Walnut Creek plans to begin offering the clubs later this school year.

The Wake County school system is helping by having buses take the students home from the clubs. Tammy Carey, principal of Barwell, said the buses ensure equity so that all students are able to participate.

The response to the clubs has been positive.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Neenee Vinsen, a school volunteer at Barwell whose 10-year-old brother, Curtis Brooks, attends the school. “It’s keeping the kids active and involved with the school.”

Curtis Brooks has been going to the First in Fitness club, which is preparing Barwell students for the countywide First in Fitness athletic competition in March.

“I’m sitting in my chair and I want to move around,” said Curtis, a fifth-grade student. “So when they call First in Fitness, I’m saying, ‘Yes,’ because in First in Fitness we’re always exercising and keep moving around instead of sitting in our chairs.”

Joycie Finol, 10, a fifth-grade student, is a big fan of the coding/robotics club. She spent last Thursday programming a small robot to travel through an obstacle course of books in the school library.

“We get to play here with all these cool clubs and there are cool robots,” she said.

While the clubs have educational purposes, Carey said they’ve also helped the students build closer relationships with each other and with teachers.

“There’s so much camaraderie,” she said. “The kids are so much more connected.”

Carey and Vonda Kai Martin Jenkins, the principal of Walnut Creek, have been sharing their experiences with the principals at the 10 Wake County schools that will use the restart model starting in the 2017-18 school year.

The Wake County schools that got the extra flexibility are Bugg, Fox Road, Millbrook and Poe elementary schools and Carroll and East Millbrook middle schools in Raleigh; East Garner Elementary and East Garner Middle in Garner; East Wake Middle near Knightdale and Wendell Middle School.

James Overman, Wake’s area superintendent for elementary support, said it’s too soon to say whether any of those 10 new restart schools will offer after-school clubs like Barwell and Walnut Creek.

Merrill, the superintendent, told school board members last week that the 10 new restart schools are still deciding how to use their new flexibility.

“You just don’t design it over the weekend,” he said. “They’re in design mode right now – all of them – and they’re all looking at things differently.”

This story was originally published February 13, 2017 at 4:39 PM with the headline "Innovative clubs make staying after school fun."