Mary Byrne
With freshly painted walls and new furniture, the classrooms reconfigured, and hundreds of new students navigating the hallways, Chenery Upper Elementary School has begun what Principal Laura Smith is referring to as the building’s “inaugural year.”
Previously home to the middle school, Chenery Upper Elementary School, known more commonly as the CUE, is now home to the fourth-, fifth– and sixth-grade classes. Last year, the seventh grade moved to the middle school; this fall, the fourth graders joined the CUE.
As the only returning group of students, the current sixth-grade class will experience the most change.
“We’re moving from one big school to two small houses,” Smith said. “The idea behind that is to create a smaller learning community with students, where they feel really well known.”
One house, located on the first and second floors, is called Waverley; the other, on the third floor, is called Cushing. With each house home to students in all three grade levels for all three years, students will get to know who their next teachers will be.
“It will take what is a 1,000-person school and make it a much smaller learning community, so it feels more personal, more connected,” Smith said.
According to Smith, reconfiguration also meant welcoming some middle school staff into the building.
“We had these great cultural building days,” she said. “There were six spread across the winter where fourth, fifth, and sixth grade teachers came together and really asked hard questions around what do we want this school to be about. … It really is almost building a school from the ground up.”
Working groups were created to help develop a new set of core values.
“We were lucky to have four days of training in the summer for the entire new CUE staff to put into place responsive classrooms, which is a model of instruction that is sort of going to be the foundation of turning our school into an upper elementary school,” Smith said. “Those teachers came together and identified that these are the things we believed and the things we want to do.”
The acronym that arose from those discussions was Chenery CARES: Collaboration, Agency, Responsibility, Empathy, and Self-regulation.
“It’s really about having respect for yourself, having respect for others, having respect for your environment, and treating those things with care,” Smith said. “Through morning meetings each day there will be a social curriculum where students have opportunities to practice these values, to learn what it means to appropriately exhibit those skills and to get better at them.”
Smith said bringing together staff from six different schools in town will require an “intricate balance.”
I know for the elementary schools, they’ve developed traditions and values over time,” she said. “We’ve asked people what is important to you, and what do you want to keep going as far as field trips and units and year-end traditions they do.”
In short, they’ll be working to balance the new with the old.
“This is a year where we are going to find out what it really means to be an upper elementary school, all of us — the community and us here,” she said. “We’re eager to work with everyone to find out what is working …. It’s truly a partnership with the community to make kids feel successful.”
