School begins for LPS students
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By MARGARET REIST / Lincoln Journal Star
They started gathering at 8 a.m. Wednesday, an hour before the school bell at Maxey Elementary put a period mark at the end of summer.
They were ready, with their backpacks and lunch boxes, their coffee and their cameras, parents and students on the perennial day of new beginnings.
And there were lots of them. More than Principal Patrick Decker had ever seen. And the guy’s been around awhile.
He was there the first day Maxey Elementary opened, another new beginning in 1995, when 375 students and their parents walked through the big double doors.
Fast forward to Wednesday, when a whopping 771 students, including a record 135 kindergartners, showed up for class.
It took 15 minutes for them to all file by Decker, who waved and shook hands and greeted the expectant, the nervous, the smiling and the weepy.
“We’ve never had this many before,” Decker said. “It’s huge.”
Thank a burgeoning school district, one projecting 33,800 students this year, including a record kindergarten class for the third year running.
Every one of those kindergartners will spend the whole day in school this year, marking the end of the three-year implementation of all-day kindergarten in LPS.
At Maxey, the 135 kindergartners who found their nametags and their seats Wednesday were largely oblivious to the process that meant this year there would be time for lunch and recess, music, art, computer, PE and extra time to learn the fundamentals.
That process, however, was no small undertaking.
It involved additions to 12 elementaries and nearly $5.2 million to pay for the extras supplies, 70 new teachers and planning time to make all-day kindergarten work.
A $250 million bond issue approved by voters in 2006 paid for the additions.
Maxey’s 250-seat addition includes new kindergarten classrooms. The school has a total of six kindergarten classes this year.
The students in those classes will be able to learn at a slower pace now, said Judy Sorensen, the kindergarten team leader. They’ll also have more time to work on reading and math, and teachers will be sure to make time for things like plan-do review.
Plan-do review — where students can choose different activities to practice skills they’ve just learned as well as the social niceties of getting along with each other — often got lost in the hurry to get other things done in half a day.
But Sorensen is among those teachers who think it’s vital.
“To them it’s playing and it is,” she said. “But playing is a child’s work and we see a lot of learning.”
And here’s what the students started to learn on their first day:
That you can remember your classmates’ names by singing “Tickety, Tickety Bumble Bee.” That knowing how to stand in line is a necessary skill. That you have to take turns talking. That the word ambulance starts with “a.”
And that lunch involves some thinking, and a little counting.
First, there’s hot and cold lunch, a concept Diane Ziemer taught to the group of students huddled around her.
“All these people are having cold lunch. Let’s count them together,” said Mrs. Ziemer, who taught all-day kindergarten at another elementary last year and so is an old hand at this stuff.
Then the hot lunch dilemma, which really wasn’t so bad, with the help of an ace problem-solver like Mrs. Ziemer.
“Now, think about what your tummy would like,’’ she went on. “Cheese pizza or mini corn puppies?”
For the group of kindergartners quickly becoming old hands at line-standing and counting and name recognition, it was an easy question to answer.
And then they were ready for the next challenge.
Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.
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M wrote on August 20, 2008 4:01 pm:
Love it wrote on August 21, 2008 9:18 am: