Kristin Harty Barkley
CUMBERLAND — The annual science fair wasn’t drawing a crowd anymore at Flintstone Elementary School.
Students and parents just didn’t seem interested.
“We found that families were having trouble with focusing only on science,” said Principal Sharon Morgan. “The children in the younger grades really didn’t understand the scientific process.”
Instead of canceling the science fair — long a staple of public education in America — school staff brainstormed to come up with a creative alternative.
The resulting Family Interest Fair in April attracted nearly 200 students and their families, earning Flintstone Elementary mention in a national publication.
Three other Allegany County elementary schools — Parkside, Frost and Bel Air — are included in the 2009 edition of the National Network of Partnership Schools’ Promising Partnership Practices.
Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s an annual collection of creative and successful school practices designed to improve family and community involvement in schools.
The 2009 collection features practices from 82 schools from across the country.
Flintstone’s fair gave students and their families an opportunity to pick their own project topics, drawing from their hobbies, talents and interests. Last year’s entries included everything from a project about horses — one family visited a horse farm where their first-grader interviewed the owner — to a project about the history of the teddy bear, which was presented on a wooden cutout of a bear.
“It was just really a lot of fun to find out what families knew about — their interests, places they had gone,” Morgan said, adding that the school hosted a family work night to foster family involvement. “One family did taxidermy, another family made bicycles. ... Some made games together. They designed their own game boards with pieces.”
The event was so successful that this year Flintstone Elementary is expanding it to two nights instead of one, Morgan said. It’s scheduled for April 20-21.
Here are the other Allegany County school projects mentioned in the 2009 National Network of Partnership Schools’ Promising Partnership Practices:
• More than 60 percent of Bel Air Elementary School students participated in the St. Jude Math-a-Thon, raising more than $5,800 for the children’s research hospital. Students solicited pledges from their families and the community for each correctly answered question in workbooks provided by St. Jude’s.
• More than a third of students at Parkside Elementary School participated in the school’s Fall Movie Night, which welcomed families to the school to watch “The Wizard of Oz.” Teachers received a list of voluntary, take-home activities tied to the Oz theme, including reading the original text, science experiments based on events in the movie, social studies reports on Kansas and activities in costume design.
• Challenged by a drop in overall attendance during the first semester of school last year, Frost Elementary School launched an Attendance Roundup program to encourage coming to school. A school action team created a set of incentives, including prizes, gift certificates and popcorn parties. It worked. Between January and March, the overall attendance rate increased by 2 percent, with a 5 percent increase among students who receive free and reduced meals.
Contact Kristin Harty Barkley at kharty@times-news.com.
