By Christina G. Hange
Photos by Tanya Ackerman

Eight-year-old Annie Carver puzzles over a piece of newsprint, an artist’s charcoal in her hand. She looks at a ruddy apple on the table and sets her chin on her free hand, studying the apple’s shadows. Her forehead wrinkles with the frustration of a child-sized artist’s block.

“She wanted us to draw something real,” Annie says.

“She” is Joan Enderhes, a Kent State University art professor and this week’s guest art instructor at Cornerstone Community School in Kent, Annie’s school. Enderhes shows the children samples of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of animal bones and encourages them to use shadow and shape. Just an hour earlier, these same young artists were fascinated biologists using plastic spoons to dig into the thigh bone of a lamb. Last week’s creative constructions of springs, screws and hinges are displayed in the hall.

It’s all connected — at least in Annie’s class, where every lesson every day is tied to the month’s unit theme.

Annie’s class consisted of only five students in April as the school year neared its close and students completed the unit of that month, “Our Body and Other Simple Machines.” By the first day of school in September, enrollment for the three Cornerstone grade levels had nearly doubled, requiring the school to move out of rented church space in downtown Kent to roomier quarters in neighboring Stow.

Cornerstone Community School is one of few elementary schools in the nation to follow the lead of private schools in Washington and Pittsburgh by offering a completely integrated curriculum, says Roberta Wycoff, director of education for Cornerstone, who writes the school’s curriculum. In these schools, all subjects, from math to art and everything in between, are investigated in light of a monthly theme, with teachers emphasizing their interconnection and interdependence. Suddenly the scientific definition of a simple machine is linked to the body’s hinged joints. And those link to Georgia O’Keeffe’s animal bones. “The hip bone’s connected to the ...”

And students like Annie make the connection.

“It’s like real life,” says Lisa Herman, Annie’s teacher. “You don’t go out into your job and say, ‘I’m only going to do math today.’”

The neck bone’s connected to the back bone ...

Cornerstone is a Christian school, but it is not traditional. A paper sign spanning the kindergarten room door reads, “Welcome to Our School Community.” Executive Director Paul Organ says the word “community” is included in the school’s name intentionally.

“Some people want to sort of have their own little Christian fortress or enclave away from the community,” he says. “Our culture is already very individualized. The more we try to emphasize the community, the better.”

That community interaction is reflected through multi-age instruction, frequent field trips, visits from community members, and class service projects in and around the Kent area. Although Organ admits the school misses the community-central location of downtown Kent, he says the community has now expanded with the school’s new location, requiring more planning for transportation.

Cornerstone’s model, the Pittsburgh Urban School, is also a non-denominational Christian school emphasizing holistic, community education. But the education approach is not a strictly private one. Tim Rasinski, a curriculum studies professor in Kent State’s College of Education and co-author of a textbook about integrated curriculum, says some public school teachers and several charter schools in Ohio try to use some form of integrated curriculum in the classroom. Rasinski says education students use this approach in many of their classes, even if it is not widely used in school systems.

“Our hope is that those students will go out and change the tradition,” Rasinski says. “Schools should be like the community in which kids live. The school itself should reflect society.”

But Patricia Franklin, Cornerstone’s office executive and a former middle school teacher, says few schools have the resources to offer completely integrated programs.

“Most educators will say this is a very good way to go, but in a public setting it is just too expensive,” she says. “It’s so healthy. It’s so child-affirming. We really hope to be able to test out ideas other schools can use.”

The back bone’s connected to the thigh bone ...

Cornerstone Community School first opened in fall 1995 with one class of eight kindergarten and first-grade students, one teacher and about 25 parents and community supporters. Since then, the school has added one class each year and now enrolls 58 students in kindergarten through fourth grade. The school uses a multi-age approach, combining first and second grades into Form 1 and third and fourth grades into Form 2. Soon, a Form 3 will be created, completing the span of elementary schooling offered.

Although Cornerstone hadn’t planned to move out of its rented rooms at the First Christian Church in Kent for another year, Organ says the school received an early opportunity to combat overcrowding. The school’s new location, in the Stow Alliance Fellowship at Stow and Arndale roads, offers enough room to see the school through the addition of two more grades. It also offers more open space, outdoor play areas and playing fields for soccer and baseball.

Members of the school’s board of trustees began planning the school’s structure and mission almost two years before Cornerstone’s doors first opened. As each grade level is added, Organ says parents and trustees carefully consider how to best meet the educational needs of the students — without forgetting something important.

“We’ve got such a good mix of parents that we have all the pieces,” Organ says. “If we were all the same, we probably would have missed some things.”

Annie’s parents, Charlotte and Ken Carver of Stow, are two of the school’s founding parents. Ken, a graphic designer, helps with school publications and promotional pamphlets. Charlotte often volunteers in the classroom. She donated lamb bones from the butcher shop to the eager biologists in the Form 2 class.

“I thought, ‘Hey, these guys can get 18 cents’ worth of investigation out of this bone,’” she says.

Charlotte says the education Annie is receiving is invaluable. Showing children life’s connections just makes sense, and the small group activities give them opportunities to do something with their energy.

“It’s not just taking traditional curriculum and adding ‘Christian’ to it,” she says. “I feel like so much of my schooling was about listening, listening, listening. People tend to think that if kids aren’t completely still and sitting and looking at you that they’re not learning.”

The thigh bone’s connected to the leg bone ...

Cornerstone Community School is still in the start-up stages, Organ says. It sought an official charter from the state of Ohio this fall. Bussing is now available, and tuition rose to $2,950 for grades 1 through 4 and $1,875 for the half-day kindergarten. Organ says the growth is slow but steady.

“It seems every time we take a step, we say, ‘Well, that worked out. Let’s take another.’”

Rasinski says enrollment in private schools across the state is growing. But changing an entrenched system of public education is a slow process. Certain schools, such as three in Columbus — Indianola School, Douglass Middle School and Alternative High School — are known for innovative teaching techniques. If other schools are trying integrated curriculums, they are doing it only in individual classes. For example, two teachers at Walls Elementary School in Kent had a wall knocked out between classrooms so they could teach their 40 students as a team, Rasinski says.

“A lot of it is just tradition,” he says. “There’s also political resistance, and some of the public may not see the whole picture. For example, they think test scores are the only measure of success.” But education has other goals, Rasinski says. “Working together. How do you measure that in a test score?”

The integrated approach to curriculum is actually what most colleges of education endorse, the teachers say. But once a teacher gets on the job, multi-age instruction far from “skill-and-drill” is more an ideal than a reality.

Form 1 teacher Cindy Zirbel says using integrated curriculum is harder than traditional curriculum. The difficulties and rewards can be weighed on either side.

“I have fewer kids and more support and no mean principal breathing down my neck, but I have to come up with my own curriculum,” Zirbel says. “We are given ideas, but then we think, ‘How am I going to make a day of this? or a month or even a year?’”

Volunteer help from parents and community members is vital to the school. Students receive about an hour of instruction in Spanish, music and art every week, all taught by visitors, several of whom instruct college students during the week. Parents offer afternoon workshops on “Fantastic Fridays” to share with students their expertise in gardening, bowling, woodworking and other hobbies unrelated to the current unit. Zirbel’s class of 15 receives a visitor almost every day. Annie’s mother is just one example. But Herman says the parent involvement takes some getting used to.

“It’s intimidating at first. Then you just kind of get used to it,” she says. “It’s necessary because so much of the learning is hands-on and in small groups. You just need more people.”

The leg bone’s connected to the foot bone ...

Mornings at Cornerstone are often devoted to subjects on which students need more concentration, such as math and reading, Herman says. The afternoon revolves more around hands-on activity in the current theme. Math is the only subject for which Cornerstone teachers use traditional textbooks because of the difficulty finding a library book that covers all the skills students need, Wycoff says.

All other reference materials come from the library and outside sources. The three teachers agree more work may be required of them in lesson planning, but the work is more rewarding.

“It’s exactly how I wanted to teach,” says former kindergarten teacher BethAnn Green, who moved to Georgia in August. A graduate of Mt. Vernon Nazarene College, Green taught preschool children in a Chicago-area public school and substituted in a private Christian school. Neither place fulfilled her education hopes.

“When I taught in preschool, I felt the most academically free, but the most stifled with my beliefs,” she says. “Then, at the Christian school, I felt free with my beliefs, but academically squashed.”

Integrated curriculum is harder to teach. Money usually spent on textbooks goes instead to books from regular publishers and bookstores. Teachers need more training and support.

Above all, Rasinski says, changing the face of education today requires encouraging administrators.

“I think one thing we do need is better school leadership,” he says. “So we have principals who will support teachers who explore this integrated curriculum.”

After all, the body can’t go anywhere without its head.