Key To School's Success? "No Excuses"

Farnsworth Aerospace Elementary Magnet School in St. Paul, MN -- described as a "beat the odds" school -- was awarded $10,000 and computer equipment by the Minnesota Business Partnership Monday for making a difference in the achievement gap of poverty stricken, minority students. 

As ANN reported last year, the school employs a variety of tasks associated with something most kids are naturally drawn to -- aerospace -- to encourage those kids to work harder than they might have otherwise.

Principal Troy Vincent said a key to Farnsworth's success is, "No excuses." When asked if promoting student achievement is that simple, "Yes, it is," he said. "If you treat them like they're yours."

The school has numbers to prove its success. Test scores show it is doing as well or better than state averages in reading and math in the past three years, reports the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune. Low-income and minority students are scoring far higher than state averages for those groups.

Overall, 76 percent of students were proficient in math and 73 percent were proficient in reading on last year's state testing with 74 percent of those belonging to minority groups with a full 77 percent living below the poverty line.

The goal is "88 (percent proficient) in '08,'" said Vincent, principal of the school for the past seven years (shown below).

Vincent said writing is constantly stressed and the school displays student work continually. He personally tracks student progress each week to identify someone who might need a little extra help, those that do find it small groups.

Trillion Woodberry is more than excited to be attending the school. At the ripe old age of six, he already knows what he wants to do with his life. He wants to be, "An engineer. I want to design spaceships."

"I have a model space shuttle. It's about this big," he said, holding his fingers a few inches apart. "Its bay doors are open. I also have books about space. A lot of them."

Vincent said he plans to use the prize money toward musical instruments for the school band and a field trip for first- and second-graders to the Kennedy Space Center in Houston, specifically the pool used to train astronauts in weightlessness.

"Astronauts visit the school. Pilots visit the school," said Lewis Scott, executive director of Elementary Education for the St. Paul Public Schools, of a school that owns its own flight simulator.

"It makes learning so much fun. They want to have fun when they're learning. And if you make it that way, they'll learn whatever you put in front of them."

FMI: www.mnbp.com, www.farnsworth.spps.org