Creative juices flow at school.

Byline: LARRY BACON The Register-Guard

NORTH BEND - The lesson begins with a story about a generous lady named Gwenyth Give-away who lives high in the misty mountains.

Then teacher Maggie Partner tells the blended class of second- and third-graders to divide their art paper into thirds and use their crayons to draw three rows of mountains representing where Gwenyth lives. She tells them to draw three peaks in the top section, four in the middle section and five in the bottom section.

As the kids color, triangles begin to emerge - lots of triangles.

"How many triangles?" Partner asks, writing the numbers on the blackboard as the students begin shouting out their individual totals.

The numbers soon begin climbing into the hundreds. Partner discovers that some students are subdividing their bigger triangles into smaller ones, to inflate their totals. The great triangle race is on.

"You guys are in a triangle-making mode today," she says with a laugh.

But she is pleased. Later, she says the kind of creativity the exercise produced is what the Lighthouse School program is designed to inspire.

Lighthouse School, the first independent charter school in the Coos Bay-North Bend area, opened this fall as a separate entity in a wing of North Bay Elementary School, in the Hauser area north of North Bend.

The school has 48 students in kindergarten through third grade. It operates with a staff of three certified teachers and an aide. Director Alane Jennings, who has a background in general counseling, oversees the operation.

The goal of the local parents who took advantage of Oregon's 3-year-old charter school law was to create a school that would incorporate more art, music and dance movement into the elementary school curriculum and do it in a way that would enhance teaching the three Rs.

A morning in Partner's classroom illustrates how that can happen. She says the story about Gwenyth helped fire the imagination of the students. The students didn't know it but drawing the rows of mountain peaks was also an introduction to cursive writing.

The students used artistic techniques to create the triangles, honed their shape-recognition abilities and used math skills to count the triangles and determine the difference between the highest and lowest numbers. And they had fun doing it, Partner observes.

"There are a lot of creative and unique children in there," she says.

Earlier in the day, her class burned off some energy by gathering in a circle for songs, dance and rhythm stick exercises that required them to understand some fairly complicated number sequences.

Jennings says such a "holistic" teaching approach happens in all the school's classrooms and is intended to channel learning through a variety of avenues, in recognition of the fact that people learn in different ways.

The children have access to plenty of books, but there are no textbooks at Lighthouse School and few of the worksheets used in traditional classrooms, Jennings says.

At the beginning of the school year, she says, a few parents grew concerned about their children not bringing home traditional homework and decided to put them back into regular classrooms.

But for the most part, she says, the feedback from parents has been good. Even though the school takes a nontraditional approach, she says, it retains a solid emphasis on traditional academic subjects and every effort is made to enable students to perform well on standardized achievement tests.

Lighthouse School's plan is to add one grade level each year until it's teaching students through eighth grade. It is one of 22 charter schools in Oregon and is modeled after the Village School, a Eugene charter school.

A charter to operate within the North Bend School District was granted to Lighthouse School by the North Bend School Board last year, but it initially was turned down because board members were reluctant to divert any of the district's state support to the new alternative school.

After granting a charter, school boards usually are required by state law to pass along at least 80 percent of the state money it would have received for each student to the charter school.

The North Bend board finally agreed to a settlement in which Lighthouse School gets 61 percent of the state support for each student it enrolls.

The agreement, which required a state waiver, also allows the charter school free use of the North Bay Elementary School facilities, free custodial service, and access to school district buses and the school lunch program.

The North Bend district will decide whether the program meets district curriculum and testing standards and state regulations, and keep an eye on its financial operations, Superintendent Jim Howard says. It also will help the school meet the special needs of handicapped students, he says, "But beyond that we're trying to be as much hands-off as we can."

Parents put their children in the charter school for a variety of reasons, Jennings says, including the smaller class size, the arts emphasis, and the Spanish language instruction offered at all grade levels.

There's been a positive reaction to some of the special touches, she says, such as a ritual in which every teacher shakes hands and recognizes by name each of their students as they arrive and depart each day.

Suzanne Adams was home-schooling her 9-year-old son, Mackie, the past two years because he's taller than other children his age that he stands out. That caused him to be the butt of much cruel teasing when he was in public kindergarten, she says.

But he's adjusted well as a third-grader at Lighthouse School, she says, no longer feels out of place and doesn't want to come home at the end of the day.

"There is joy," she says. "And it has to do with the creative style of teaching."

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