On white pages in a red scrapbook that Donna Manwarren clutches to her chest are the words she wrote a decade ago to describe a transformation of her 7-year-old daughter, Nicole Grey.
Gets up promptly in the morning, no crying. . .
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Completes her homework assignments without usual coaxing. . .
Overall Nicole seemed to have matured 2/3 years in her expressive speech, in her sensitivity to others and their feelings, and has a new sense of self confidence.
The same year that No Child Left Behind was born, so, too, was a program at New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Montgomery County that gave a rare opportunity to a class of second-graders, many from low-income neighborhoods and homes where English wasn’t regularly spoken. That year, infused into every part of the students’ curriculum was the creation of an opera.
Their teachers describe seeing striking changes in them. Shy students began to speak more. Students who hated writing began filling pages on end with their thoughts. Students who were ambivalent about school suddenly began showing up every day.
“We would see in our students what I used to call a fuzziness,” said Ellen Bloom, who started the class in 2001 along with Mary Ruth McGinn. “They were just not there. They were not engaged. The opera really took care of that. It woke them up.”
But what happened once those students left that classroom? Did they stay awake?
On a recent Saturday night, the answers to those questions stood before them, taller and more mature than their teachers remembered.
A decade after the first students passed through the program, several dozen alumni from six classes gathered in front of an elementary school stage that most hadn’t seen in years. It was their first reunion, a celebration that also served as an opportunity to gauge the long-term impact of an ambitious arts education program, the kind disappearing from many money-strapped public schools.
Even in affluent Montgomery County, the opera program was greeted with skepticism, McGinn and Bloom recalled. Some parents questioned the program’s worth, some teachers argued that it would set up students for later disappointment when they returned to a normal classroom, and some administrators worried about its impact on test scores.
Instead the second-graders performed on par with their peers on tests and showed better attendance, more advanced writing skills and a greater likelihood of being designated gifted and talented.
“People told us over and over again you couldn’t do this,” McGinn reminded her former students. “But you did, and you showed everybody.”
Becoming a butterfly
Bloom and McGinn said the magic of the program is that the children create every aspect of the opera. They serve, among other jobs, as electricians, composers, writers, makeup artists and public relation officers. The themes also flow from discussions in each class and over the years have included “dependence,” “legacy” and “freedom.”
For Bianca Rodriguez, second grade was the year she became a butterfly.
“We were learning about metamorphosis,” said Rodriguez, now a 17-year-old senior. “We learned how things start out small, and they change into something beautiful.”
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