Karen Csigas’s room at Lafayette School in Hammond, Indiana, resembles kindergartens everywhere. It contains small wooden desks and tables, cardboard letters hung from the ceiling, a piano, red-and-green blocks, and pictures of triangles and squares. A playhouse with a stove and refrigerator occupies one corner. A honeycomb of cubbyholes holding kids’ gear and drawings and papers occupies one wall. Off to one side is a low-standing sink, and behind that a bathroom. Two green plants are dying by the window.
As scheduled, at nine o’clock in walks Angela Zagoris, the Lafayette speech pathologist. Zagoris is a trim, outgoing young woman wearing a skirt, a plaid shirt, and a sweater vest. At her neck is a blue floppy bow. Amanda, a girl in the front row, peers at Zagoris’s throat; her mouth hangs open.
“No,” corrects the speech teacher, “this is not a tie. This is a bow. You won’t find too many boys wearing one of these.”
By this time, however, the boys in the class are growing frisky. One lad elbows his neighbor; several boys are squirming on the rug. “Pin your bottoms to the floor,” instructs Zagoris, who can spot a fidget before it appears. She quickly proceeds to the crux of her lesson, which has her holding up a succession of cards and asking the kids to explain what is going on in the picture on each one.
“That would be a bad idea,” advises Zagoris. “Let’s not have a solution that involves fighting. Come on, what would you do?”
When an ambulance whizzed by the classroom window recently, Csigas asked her kids where they thought the ambulance was heading. Somebody got shot, one kid said. Someone got stabbed, thought another. A drug overdose, figured a third. “Nobody said that maybe the ambulance was called because a mother was having a baby,” laments Csigas, “or anything like that.” When a nurse from Saint Margaret’s Hospital visited the class and showed off a jar of flour, everybody adjudged the jar to contain cocaine. One child mistook the nurse’s wheat germ for marijuana.
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This early form of tracking was instituted with a process started in Hammond called school-based decision making. Lafayette, like every school in Hammond, has a planning team composed of the principal and some staff, teachers, parents, and sometimes students that is allowed to suggest and implement changes to improve the facility. The planning team, a function of what Hammond calls SIP (for school improvement process), saw the two-tiered kindergarten as a way to better serve Lafayette’s widely varying population of five-year-olds.
