The Mattahunt Elementary School is hidden away on a dead-end street off Harvard Street in Mattapan, behind a huge cemetery. It’s in a big, sprawling building serving 700+ students and organized by grade-level pods, which paraprofessional Iolanda Amado says help create a collaborative feeling among the staff.
Lesley Ryan Miller, a former NTD colleague and now Director of School Support at the Mattahunt, invited me to visit and showed me around the school. We started in the Kindergarten wing and watched K1 students making patterns with Pattern Blocks and other manipulatives. Erin Daly’s K2 students were practicing forming letters on individual white boards, while in another K2 class Matthew Conner was demonstrating how to say a long O as two boys read a book about bird nests.
Teachers and paras were helping children with autism use a variety of media in art class, from paints to modeling clay. Fourth graders in Lisabeth Minihane’s science class were learning how to make electrical circuits, working in small groups with batteries and bulbs and wire.
When we walked into Jennifer Ansin’s third grade class, she asked us to contribute to the lesson she was leading on character traits! Lisa Scarlett had her first grade students eagerly researching animals with the help of laptop computers, while Flo Molyneaux was helping her fifth grade students evaluate and write persuasive arguments.
Our last stop was the swimming pool, where teacher Nigel Smith was teaching a group of fourth graders how to do the crawl, and para Kyla Tavares was providing 1:1 support to another group of students.
In its third year as a turnaround school, the Mattahunt is struggling with stagnant test scores. Beth Crescenzo, whose fifth grade students all have special needs, told me she really likes being part of rebuilding and redeveloping a school. I hope she and her colleagues will have the opportunity to continue the good work they are doing on behalf of their students.
Amika Kemmler-Ernst, Ed.D.
amika45@comcast.net