Champaign Unit 4 Opens New Magnet Schools
One the two magnet schools starting up in Champaign Monday will immediately expose its students to other cultures and languages.
For the expanded and renovated Garden Hills Elementary, it's taken on an international baccalaureate program. Principal Cheryl O'Leary says students and visitors will right away notice the international hallway, representing the heritage of students from overseas.
She says each grade level will partner with a school from another country, and each student will learn Mandarin Chinese. And O'Leary says international baccalaureate schools are also required to focus on 10 learner profiles - words like inquiry, open-minded, and principled.
"We have those written above throughout the hallways in the building in five different languages for the children as they go through the halls " she said. "They'll have to know what it's like to be an inquirer and what it's like to be curious. So those are some of things that we'll be instilling in them pretty young during inquiry-based learning, and hoping that it continues on in their middle and high school years."
O'Leary says planning at Champaign Unit 4's district level should allow younger students, particularly those in kindergarten, to continue similar lessons once they reach middle school.
Just over 400 students attended Garden Hills last year. An April lottery was held for additional students wanting to attend the district's two magnet schools. That will boost Garden Hills' attendance to more than 520 this fall, near capacity for the building.
Unit 4's other magnet school opening Monday, the new Booker T. Washington Elementary, carries the STEM theme, or focusing on science, technology, engineering, and math.
School principal Asia Fuller-Hamilton says it's her hope that the students develop a love for science, have an appreciation for it as they grow older, and perhaps seek out a career in it. The program will allow the school to collaborate with the U of I's I-STEM initiative.
Fuller-Hamilton says lessons integrating the subjects will literally be all around the students.
"We want to be able to answer the question, 'Why do I need to do this math problem? Why do I need to learn this about these people, or about this in science?' We try to show them how it all goes together," she said. "And actually, the way that the building is built, it allows them to do that. The gym has geometric shapes as well as area and diameter math concepts on the flooring."
The school itself includes laptops for students, conference rooms at every grade level, art and music rooms, and a reservoir for rain water in order for students to maintain a garden. Prairie grass will be planted outside, keeping students from having to travel to a park to connect with those lessons.
About 300 students will attend the new Booker T. Washington school this fall.
A tour of Champaign's Booker T. Washington Elementary School from Illinois Public Media on Vimeo.