More About Fern Bluff . . .

Success adds up at Fern Bluff school

American kids stink at math. It's a tired refrain by now - even if it is true - but here in Round Rock ISD we are doing something about it.

We're all familiar with the problem - through statistical evidence, anecdotes or both.

Regarding the former, it seems not a month goes by without one study or another proclaiming the deficiencies of our students and our education system. Students from foreign countries routinely outscore our kids on standardized math tests.

Regarding the later - the anecdotal evidence - we all have our stories to tell and they generally revolve around young cashiers who don't know how to make change. Give them a dollar and a penny, for a 51-cent purchase, and they will give you back a deer in the headlights look. They can twitter till their thumbs fall off, but they can't - as Jethro Bodine would have called it - cipher.

Getting kids interested in mathematics might seem like an impossible task. As for getting them enthusiastic about it - well, one might as well expect them to develop a liking for Brussels sprouts and lima beans.

And yet it can be done - because it has been done - at Fern Bluff Elementary, where the school's Math Pentathlon club recently won a national championship in which 219 schools competed. Credit belongs to the entire Fern Bluff Bobcat community- students, parents and teachers alike - but most especially worthy of praise is Bobcat mom Lisa Mack, who took her own daughter's interest in math and built it into a club 140 students ended up joining.

In order to accommodate so many children, Mack recruited parents to help out as coaches and in other volunteer positions. Fern Bluff Principal Elizabeth Wilson and her team of teachers deserve praise for getting behind the effort.

School personnel have a lot on their plates. Adding one more task could not have been easy. Yet Wilson and Fern Bluff teachers took the challenge on, with no guarantee the effort would become the spectacular success that it has.

Mathematics - as much as any other academic discipline and maybe more than most - relies on a student's cumulative knowledge. The building blocks for success must be established early. That is what the Fern Bluff Math Pentathlon club has done, with 140 of the school's 900 kindergarten through fifth-grade students participating in its inaugural year.

Back in the 1990s, we saw what fifth-grade teacher Linda Wiley did with the Excel City program at Berkman Elementary. There was no reason every Round Rock ISD elementary could not have developed a similar program.

Just as there is no reason the district's other elementaries cannot follow the example Fern Bluff has now set.

Editorial
Round Rock Leader
June 12, 2009