Graduating From 'Family'

Va. Teacher Guided, And Grew Close to, Class Over Five Years

Melissa Fleischer has been there most of their lives.

She dried David Nguyen's tears on the first day of first grade when he missed his mother. In second grade, she rejoiced with Karen Rosales when Karen's baby brother was born. This year, in fifth grade, she comforted their classmate Edgar Toyos after his father received a diagnosis of cancer.

But tonight, Fleischer's 21 students at Bailey's Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences in Falls Church will line up for a "promotion ceremony" to middle school. In September, the 11 members of the class who have "looped" with her since first grade will have a new teacher for the first time in five years.

Saying goodbye isn't easy at 10 or 11, ages when birthday parties still include the entire class, when the girls grow taller than the boys, when crying makes you a baby.

"I'm really sad and wondering what I'm going to do next year," said Beau Lovdahl, 10, one of the original students in Fleischer's group. "You're used to something being there every day and suddenly it's not there anymore. All these weird things are going through my brain."

Parting is the payback for the continuity that comes with looping -- sticking with the same teacher from one grade to the next. Although Fleischer didn't set out to make so many loops with her students, their togetherness evolved.

In the fall of 1999, Fleischer, 34, who had always been a second-grade teacher, went "back" to teach first grade, hoping to learn more about how her students were prepared. She followed her first-graders to second grade, completing the usual two-year loop. But when their second-grade year ended, nobody seemed ready to let go.

After consulting parents and her principal, Fleischer moved with her students to third grade, which she never had taught. By the end of that year, she asked the question again: Should we keep going?

"But if we're going to go, it's going to be [grades] 4 and 5," she told students, parents and administrators in her signature, matter-of-fact way. "It's not a classroom. It's a family now."

Along the way, the class lost some students and added some, gradually letting the new ones in on the inside jokes that inevitably took root.

Among this year's 21 fifth-graders, 10 speak a language other than English at home, and seven have learning disabilities.

"When we started, some of these guys had no English," Fleischer recalled. She said staying with them helped her learn about their individual family situations and learning problems so she could focus her teaching more sharply. "Families are comfortable with me. I know the whole kid," she said. "Some of them need an extra little nudge. If they come in tired, I know they might have been with Dad who lives 100 miles away."

But she acknowledged that looping doesn't work for all students. And over the five years, she said, two parents have opted to put their children in a different class.

Principal Jean Frey said she plans to compare the class's standardized test scores to those of other classes to see whether the long loop has provided any statistical benefits. Socially, she said, she already knows the answer.