Principal Credited With Positive Change

Oakland Terrace Shines in State Tests

Cheryl Pulliam, winner of the Washington Post Distinguished Educational Leadership Award for 2008, is principal of an overachieving elementary school in Silver Spring.

Oakland Terrace, the second-largest elementary school in Montgomery County with 735 students, has had consistently high success rates on the Maryland School Assessment; last year, 91 percent of students passed math tests and 93 percent passed reading tests.

Last year, the school ranked seventh in suburban Maryland for the number of low-income students who rated "advanced," the highest of three performance levels, on the statewide test. Thirty percent of Oakland Terrace students qualify for federal meal subsidies because of low family income. More than one-quarter of those students rated advanced on the tests: 31 students in math and 35 in reading.

Pulliam has been principal of Oakland Terrace since 2002. Colleagues credit her with a series of positive changes at the school: accelerating the reading curriculum, integrating special-needs students into classrooms and coping with an enormous influx of kindergarten students, who now number 164.

The school's campus on Plyers Mill Road sits on the edge of Kensington, in an area of the county where the owners of million-dollar homes and low-income renters are neighbors. Pulliam has done an effective job, colleagues say, of competing with private schools and other public schools for the opportunity to educate neighborhood children.

When 10 third-grade families elected to leave Oakland Terrace in 2007 to place their children in magnet programs elsewhere in the public school system, Pulliam asked the parents to meet with members of her staff. She wanted "to understand specifically what drew parents and their children to these other programs so the same rigor and enrichment could be offered" at Oakland Terrace, according to a description of the incident included with the materials submitted with Pulliam's nomination for the award.

Rising enrollment in several grades is a testament to her success: Some of the children came to Oakland Terrace from private schools.

She is popular with faculty and students alike.

"Mrs. Pulliam can be very fun at times but also knows how to lay down the law when she needs to," wrote Victoria Cabellos, a student.