Wednesday is the first day of classes at the new Johnston Elementary School. Hosting about 1,000 students in grades 2 through 5, the facility features an expanded library and breakout areas for more interactive learning. It’s a state-of-the-art building that cost roughly $92 million and replaces the town’s four aging neighborhood schools.
Ocean State Media morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with Johnston Schools Superintendent Scott Sutherland about what students can expect and his hopes for the new school year.
Interview highlights
On the modern amenities of Johnston Elementary School
Scott Sutherland: The classrooms aren’t the typical classrooms that you and I went to. They have interactive boards. All the students will be equipped with a new Chromebook. The Chromebooks will replace our old chalkboards, where their answers on the Chromebooks can now be seen on the large display screen in the class.
We have four “Da Vinci Centers.” The Da Vinci Centers are set up in a way where it's an open classroom. So if you take your typical classroom and double it, and then make it more like a living room area with both traditional seating and then other areas that are cozy (with) little nooks with more comfortable seating for independent classroom projects. So that's really exciting for us.
On the educational value of Da Vinci Centers
Sutherland: So we're actually bringing all of our career and technical education down to the middle and elementary school. These areas are designed for STEM activities – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. They're set up for arts and design. One of them is tied to a kiln right behind it, so it's going to allow the students to have more lessons with innovation. It’s going to allow for entrepreneurship activities, where the CTE classes can actually come in and work with them in these areas. It's designed for hands-on, project-based learning. We've already started planning on having our career and technical education students come down in those areas and work with our students during the day. So we'll have our biomedical students come in and bring cadavers with them – not real cadavers, but they'll bring maybe dissections. So it's going to be really exciting.
On how students will be impacted by attending a large elementary school with roughly 1,000 students
Sutherland: Well, I think for the town of Johnston, it's very exciting because now we're going to have all the same-age students in one school. So for athletics and extracurricular activities, we have 250 kids per grade. I was a principal of a school that had 1,200 students in it. It was a whole city block. This brings that same feeling.
Now that all the students are in the school, they will be receiving the same guaranteed – we call it a “viable curriculum” – that we can monitor and assess. (Teachers) can share the students' work. They can show other students, "Hey, this is where you want to be for your work. This is where you are now." Previously, we had, let's say, 50 students (in each grade) in each of the schools. While they had integration with their peers, now it's just going to be taken to a whole other level for the town.
This school has allowed the town to actually bring students back into the community that used to go to out-of-district placements because we didn't have the right facilities for them. We're able to create, for example, a therapeutic program at the school. So we have a therapeutic learning center for them, and it comes with a safe and calm room. It comes with an area where they can go to that can deescalate their behavior. Within that suite, we have a psychologist, a social worker, and a dedicated special education director, which we didn't have in our aging schools.
