Science is star at Escalante Elementary

Escalante Elementary may be cultivating young scientists.

Students at Escalante are diverse. Many come from families in poverty, and parent involvement is hard to come by. But it's among the leading schools in Salt Lake City School District in science scores.

When the school opened three years ago, Nancy McCormick, the principal, said she wanted to emphasize science — a subject that had thrived in east-side schools with more money and more parental support.

"I wanted a strong science program on the west side for minority kids," said McCormick. "Kids love science but it is left out of the curriculum a lot, because when you have a lot of kids speaking English as a second language you have to emphasize so much of the time just reading and writing and learning to speak English."

When hiring teachers, McCormick put in job descriptions that they would emphasize science in their classroom. She wanted the entire faculty trained in integrating science with reading and writing that so that science is the main core of the curriculum, said McCormick.

The word got out and before the school opened McCormick received a call from an Intel representative offering the school a $100,000 grant for a science program.

With that money, which McCormick has stretched over three years, the school created the only elementary science lab of its kind in the district. Along with a full-time lab assistant, it has dozens of microscopes from fiber optic to video, scales, an erosion table, petri dishes, a static electricity machine, fish, turtles, hamsters, and bugs and other critters.

It's stimulating, colorful and and full of hands-on opportunities.

"The kids come in a lot more awake," Michelle Stephens, Escalante's lab assistant. "They see so much that makes them curious — that curiosity draws them to learn. You don't have to instill a desire to learn, it's already there."

Stephens does all the legwork for teachers, making it possible to do more numerous and elaborate science experiments.

"The reason science doesn't get taught very much on an elementary level is you have to set up the experiment, do the experiment and clean up afterward," said McCormick. "Teachers don't have time to set it up, take it down, clean it up and still keep the class in order."

But this way it is all set up ahead of time. Teachers can come in and use all of their time for instruction.