A Progress Report from the Executive Director
Horizons at Brooklyn Friends School (BFS) just finished its second year with 29 children in the first and second grades. In essence, children at Horizons are given an eight-year
comprehensive intensive private school education, as well as enrichment
opportunities, which aim to boost their love of learning and prevent
them from sliding academically during the summer months. The program,
located in downtown Brooklyn, serves children from Public Schools 307,
287, and 46 who live in the Farragut, Ingersoll, and Whitman public
housing neighborhoods. Brooklyn Friends School is the only one of 50
independent schools in NYC to adopt the Horizons model, a program that
has been in operation for 45 years across the country. Now in 17 other
independent schools, Horizons National has brought the first Horizons
model to New York City.
Brooklyn Friends provides the overhead, administration,
and facility to run and house the Horizons model. An independent board
composed of volunteer leaders governs and fundraises for the Horizons
program, and families, teachers, principals, volunteers are involved in
all aspects of the planning, evaluation, and running of the program.
We work very closely with the principals of the public schools,
who sit on the Horizons Board, with the public schools' parent
coordinators and with the students' teachers. This ensures a smooth
recruitment and screening process and seamless coordination in using
the same pedagogical language in monitoring progress and providing
consistent intervention. This collaborative relationship is evident on
all levels including: 1: the assessment skills sheet we created that
was used by public school teachers to identify the skill needs of each
child and 2: a similar form that the Horizons teachers used this
summer to complete and give back to the public school teachers and the
parents with work done and progress made.
Mornings were devoted to meeting time,
individualized work in small reading groups, and math work/games.
Children are divided into reading groups based on pre, mid, and post
assessments using DIBELS through Wireless Generation. As a result of a
recent grant received through Horizons National, our new reading
specialist, and another teacher with a special education background,
were able to work closely with children who were in need of
intervention.
This year’s program enrichment components included the following,
most of which were provided in-kind by neighborhood organizations or
volunteers:
• Swim instruction three afternoons a week at the nearby Long Island University pool
• Dance class one afternoons a week with a professional dancer from the Mark Morris Dance Group
• Ceramics Instruction one afternoon a week with a Brooklyn Friends parent who is a ceramicist
• Computer class two afternoons a week with our head or technology
In addition, children went on weekly field trips. Trips were taken
to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Audubon Center (fishing
contest), Staten Island Children’s Museum, and the Brooklyn Children’s
Museum. There is a small teacher/student ratio of 1 to 7. In addition,
twenty volunteers worked in the Horizons program this summer,
decreasing this adult/student ratio to 1 to 3. Volunteers are parents
from BFS, students and former BFS students, and neighborhood youth from
local schools.
Outcomes/Results
Research has demonstrated that low-income students who are at
grade level in June slide academically by two months every summer and
children who are behind their peers slide as much as 4 1⁄2 months.
Enrichment programs like Horizons have been shown to stem this tide and
keep children engaged in learning.
Our goal in the broadest sense is to prevent children from
falling behind academically during the summer. Our overall attendance
rate this summer was 89%. Data collected by our reading specialist
(using a handheld computer provided to us by Wireless Generation)
revealed to us that our Kindergarten class had a mean increase of 34%
in Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF) and our first graders showed an increase of 26% in PSF, a 19% increase in Nonsense Word Fluency, and a 16% increase in Oral Reading Fluency.
Our teachers also used other assessment tools as well and concluded
beyond a doubt that their students either increased their academic
skills or they remained at their same level. Parents/guardians also
rated our overall program in the 9's and 10's (10 being the highest
rating) and attendance at all family functions/gatherings was extremely
high.
In addition, the NATIONAL SUMMER LEARNING ASSOCIATION (NSLA)
observed and assessed our program over the summer using their "quality
standards." NSLA found our Horizons program as: "1.) having
realistic, specific, measurable goals for student learning and; 2.)
employing a strong, dedicated staff who exhibited genuine interest in
teaching and improving the lives of youth that the program serves."
One other nice sign of progress is that the BFS parent body for the
second year in a row has decided to give 80% of the festival's proceeds
to the Horizons program. This demonstrates quite clearly that there is
complete support of the Horizons program.
Overall, we were very pleased with our progress this past summer
thanks to our students and their families; the public school teachers
and administration; our teachers, volunteers and parent body at
Brooklyn Friends; our community partners (LIU and Mark Morris); and of
course our board. We look forward to adding another 15 children to our
roster next year, totaling 45 and to welcoming new funding partners and
public schools.
Carla Precht, Executive Director