Brooke’s eyes behold beautiful Bancroft

by Brooke Wagenheim

A breath of fresh air can be inhaled at 1315 E 38th Street, alongside the Meridian Gardens, where The Bancroft School is located. This elementary school is truly unique and I was rewarded with an enthusiastic and accepting response when I stopped by to take a tour.
Upon Entering the large brick builiding I caught a reminder of my own childhood past, the multitudes of bulletin boards adorned with art projects of all sorts of dimensions and mediums. The highly polished shine of the floor led me to corridors, each filled with their own stories, overhung with beautifully concocted art, some permanent and others weekly highlights. A World of Stories is a grand, artful ceramic story mural designed and created in 1995 byBancroft students and resident artist Susan E. Warner. This masterpiece was funded in part by the Minnesota State Arts Board.
“Word of the Day” posters sport interesting and somewhat advanced words for every grade level on a daily basis. The two most interesting and heart warming displays are a board full of students’ renditions of what appeared to be a copy of Van Gogh’s, A Starry Night. The various interpretations of the painting reveal the overwhelming potential of these children. The other whimsical feature, one of many in the Bancroft hallways, is a huge display of handmade genuine comic strips called, appropriately, "Funny Pages for the Bancroft Bulldog."
These comics were inventive and gleeful. One depicted two little alien globules coming out of their spaceship, happening upon a cat, exclaiming to each other, “I said take me to your leader and then it started hissing at me.” Another one was of a spider web spun in the area of a complete doorway. "OK, get ready," one of the well-hidden spiders said, "when I hit the fire alarm, we’ll score." "Yeah, and we’ll eat like kings, I hope it works." On one wall, the letters of Bancroft are spelled out in a collage of flowers, reminding us of the present season of renewal. There is also three dimensional art in every hallway. It’s very impressive and uplifting to see.
I happen across a large white pushcart, neatly tucked amongst one of the many intertwining hallways. It is laden with well-sprouted seedlings, growing enthusiastically under a synthetic light. Bancroft has a plant sale fundraiser annually, sponsored by the schools PTO committee. The profits go toward essential buses, field trips, and to help supportprograms that benefit all Bancroft students. There is also an annual food drive to support Minnesota Food Share, theater work from Stages Theater Company, funded by the Minnesota State Arts Board, where the students have the opportunity to explore singing, dancing and musical performance. The school was awarded a dance residency by an organization called Stages, as well as keyboard lessons from the Schubert Club, based on the successes of integrating fine arts into its curriculum.
Bancroft celebrated Earth Day with a week of assemblies, observing and pledging to the Earth with performances of songs and skits by the students as well as artist Rachel Kroog and environmentalist John Neville. There seems to be an abundance of programs designed to ensure each individual student’s needs to grow and flourish. Even though the predicted number of non English speaking students was swelled more than three-fold, the statistics of receiving the “Quality Performance Award” for efforts to improve achievement exemplifies the shool’s ability to help students adjust.
An open computer lab is available to the students every week and the Neighborhood Tutoring Project, sponsored by Neighborhood Associations in the Field, Regina, Northrop and Bancroft communities provide training for community volunteers to help students.
There is a program called Accelerated Reader that encourages students to read independently. Designating books and administering computerized comprehension tests to see what the child actually got from the experience of the story and rewarding the child with points is definitely a good way to get kids to want to read.
The school acknowledges the importance of celebrating success by having weekly school-wide Merit Awards to recognize achievements, efforts and decisions, and "Bulldog Pride" award assemblies that encourage parent partcipation.
Maybe you’ve heard the Bancroft students broadcasting events weekly on KBEM Radio. This may have sparked your interest, as it did mine, in teacher Sandi Likely who taught Taiko Drum to all the 4th graders, has also providing drum-making materials and instruction. The students have performed at Minnesota State University in Mankato, the Torchlight Parade during the Aquatennial 2000, and for the American Association of Teaching and Curriculum Conference in Washington, D.C. The children learned two Japanese Taiko Drum pieces called Matsuri, or festival song and Renshu, a practice piece for Taiko Drumming!
Activities and crucially important field trips are well chosen and surely excite the students to magnificent heights. There have been Walk-a-Thons, Bake Sales, Raffles, Cross country skiing competitions in Wisconsin, and evenings spent visiting the Red Cliff Indian Reservation. The students have reaped the culture of having their own folk artist, Ross Sutter, in a month-long residence at Bancroft. He provided the students with two assemblies as well as classes where the third grade students made tin whistles to go with their study of sound, fourth grade students created limber-jacks to go with their study of the human body, and fifth grade students made dulcimers emphasizing math.
Bancroft has received seven Minnesota State Arts Board Artist in Residence grants since 1993. Through the Annenberg Challenge Arts for Academic Achievement program they’ve been awarded over $30,000 dollars to bring artists to the school to work with the students and teachers.
The smaller classes help teachers establish closer relationships with students in order to learn their strengths and weaknesses much faster, enabling them to increase productive learning time and individualize instruction to better meet children’s needs.
Bancroft’s mascott is the bulldog and its motto is “Expect Great Things.” Bancroft Elementary School believes “all children can become confident, successful life-long learners in a nurturing, motivating, challenging and orderly school setting,” and their test results clearly show many of them from all backgrounds andat every grade level are making outstanding learning gains.