For public schools, IB is strategy to keep kids

K-12 pathway set in unified district

The International Baccalaureate flag was hoisted Friday at Oak Forest Elementary, a fluttering amusement for students but a stake in the ground for Shelby County Schools.

If the plan goes as worked out, Oak Forest and the new IB program at Balmoral Ridgeway Elementary School will feed students to the also-new IB program at Ridgeway Middle School, which in turn will funnel students to the IB Diploma Program at Ridgeway High School.

“We are one of five IB primary programs in the state of Tennessee,” Oak Forest principal Karen Joyner told the crowd around the flagpole.

“Parents, if you have students interested in IB, we encourage you to continue through Ridgeway Middle and Ridgeway High.”

IB is a prestigious global curriculum that is recognized by colleges and universities around the world. It requires that students not only take a foreign language, but also be so fluent in it that they can speak it, write it and analyze literature and politics in it.

By establishing a K-12 IB pattern in southeast Memphis, the former Memphis City Schools was trying to secure the corner against charter schools and pri- vate schools. As a unified district that also has IB programs at Germantown and Bolton high schools, the plan now is to spread the word.

No one was doing that better than Rosemary Quinones, the mother of a Ridgeway High graduate. She is now saving roughly $52,000 a year in tuition at Rhodes College because her daughter excelled in IB.

“Yes, honestly, it’s very difficult,” she said. “She tried to quit. I

said, ‘I know it’s very hard. You have to try and you have to continue, because later you will see the advantages.’ ”

IB programs at any level are expensive, but are most expensive in high schools where every subject’s teacher has to be trained in the methodology.

Ridgeway High’s IB program is the most expensive optional school in the city. The cost includes $10,600 in annual licensing fees. Exams must be scored by outside experts, which adds to test costs. If teachers have to go out of town for training, tuition is more than $1,500 per instructor, plus travel, said Linda Sklar, head of optional school program.

The RHS program has about 150 students, including freshmen and sophomores in pre-IB. The school has capacity for more than 1,200 students.

“The growth has been pretty flat,” said Jim Long, principal at RHS until this summer when he took another administrative po-

The difficulty is attracting parents from other successful high schools.”

Jim Long, Former Ridgeway High School principal

sition in the district. “The difficulty is attracting parents from other successful high schools. We had small pool of students within our attendance boundaries. Essentially, we didn’t get transfers who stayed with program.”

Ridgeway competes with White Station, but also with Hutchison School, across the street, and Lausanne Collegiate School, which added its IB school in 2010, a year after RHS was approved.

With IB now in the feeder schools, including Oak Forest with 500 students, Long and others hope the trajectory swells. “Now you will have a cohort coming in every year with IB. If they have experienced it from kindergarten, they may be more willing to stay with IB over going to another school in the county that has a difficult, high-end academic program,” he said.

“What you get with the numbers is more opportunity for students to experience more choices in courses. With declining or static numbers, the experience is the opposite; the choices become more narrow.”

For example, Oak Forest and Ridgeway Middle offer Mandarin Chinese in their IB programs. Ridgeway High offers Mandarin too, but it doesn’t have enough takers to warrant the kind of investment IB requires. So instead of being an IB course, Mandarin is an elective.

School board member Betty Mallott warned parents not to be complacent. “Public education is being challenged right now for the dollars it takes to provide for the children in our neighborhood schools,” she said, her voice rising in the microphone.

“You are fighting for your school. You are fighting for your neighborhood. It is that important. Don’t give up.”