Wellington Education

Elbridge Gale’s Khessia Jean-Baptiste Has Created A Unique Mentoring Program

Story by Chris Felker

Photos by Abner Pedraza

Now in her seventh year at Elbridge Gale Elementary School, teacher Khessia Jean-Baptiste is carving out a special space for students who lag behind their peers.

Jean-Baptiste is teaching familiar lessons — ones she had to learn herself as a child — to a select group of these children as part of twin mentorship programs she recently started at the Wellington school.

Growing up in New York, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, she was drawn to education at an early age, learning skills that later would come in handy helping her mother run a home daycare facility.

“My mother always taught smaller kids, and at church, she ran the children’s ministries, so I would always see her in her behavior management style. She was a pretty big influence,” Jean-Baptiste recalled. “And then I realized that I was just good at it.”

She quickly learned that education would be a pathway to success in the United States. “My parents really, really pushed education, and put a lot on me to get it, because they weren’t English speakers,” Jean-Baptiste said.

She arrived in Florida with her family in 2000, when she was 14 year old. She completed her education locally, graduating from Wellington High School and attending Palm Beach Community College (now Palm Beach State College) before earning her bachelor’s degree in elementary education at Florida Atlantic University.

“During my time at FAU, because I was in Wellington, they placed me at Elbridge Gale for my student teaching,” Jean-Baptiste said. “The teachers I worked with, the third-grade staff, we got along really well. They could see that I was really driven and dedicated and wanted to do well, so they recommended that I try to get a job there.”

With support from her future colleagues, Principal Gail Pasterczyk offered Jean-Baptiste a position.

Jean-Baptiste stayed teaching third grade for a while, until she ventured out on a different path. “I started studying for the Exceptional Student Education certification so I could become an ESE teacher,” she said.

After completing the training, she taught half regular classes and half ESE classes until she decided that she wanted to give her full attention to ESE classes.

“My classes are for kids who have learning disabilities or some other exceptionality. Usually it’s the ones who are slower learners, those with emotional behavior disorders or some other health impairment that affects their ability to learn at the same rate or the same content as other students,” she said.

Jean-Baptiste explained that she is drawn to helping those children. “I like trying to find different ways to present things to them so they get it, because when they finally get it, it means so much to them,” she said.

But she came to a realization. “After being exposed to more grade levels, especially fifth grade, after I finished my first year with fifth grade, I felt concerned that some of the students were going on to middle school without having what we call ‘soft skills,’ like self-control and time management,” Jean-Baptiste said. “They didn’t really know how to do a big project from start to finish without having me help them a lot.”

It’s a problem she recalled from her own formative years. “My parents didn’t really teach me time management, and so I struggled with it a lot,” Jean-Baptiste said. “I knew that there were other kids who always just seemed to have their projects turned in on time. As I got older, I realized that I need a planner. I need to set small goals.”

With this idea in mind, she created programs to fill this need. In 2013-14, she instituted the GOLD program for girls, followed this school year by the TAGS program for boys.

“GOLD stands for Goal-Oriented Ladies of Distinction. We had a small group of about 15 girls, and I had about five or six mentors, and everybody at school was extremely receptive to it,” Jean-Baptiste said. “I knew that we’d have to start this for boys as well. So this year, we started the TAGS program, which stands for The Association of Gentlemen Scholars.”

The small group programs cater to girls who are often quiet and don’t advocate for themselves or ask for help, and boys who are often tardy, have disciplinary problems and are under-achieving. They are matched up with mentors from among about a dozen of Jean-Baptiste’s fellow teachers. She also invites outside speakers, all adult professionals, to address to the groups.

“They talk to them about what they do, try to instill in them the importance of education and being motivated and responsibility and having your own drive and not always having people telling you what to do,” Jean-Baptiste said.

The students meet with their mentors a few times a week, just to discuss problems they’re having, situations they’re dealing with and any social or emotional difficulties they’re facing. They’ll often role-play to learn different ways of coping with life’s setbacks.

“I definitely like to focus on the social and emotional learning, because kids are smart. They learn a lot. If we’re not intentionally giving them positive social things to pick up on, they’re going to pick up on the negative,” Jean-Baptiste said.

For girls, the mentoring focuses on esteem-building, goal-setting, learning how to navigate social situations, making more friends and maintaining those friendships, even social etiquette and dining etiquette. For boys, the lesson sets are a bit different: self-control, different ways to solve conflicts, the value of apologizing, being accountable for your behavior, dealing with frustrations and etiquette.

Jean-Baptiste is planning an end-of-year luncheon where the students can invite someone important to them and must RSVP and dress up.

All together, these activities add up to life and attitude training, not just education. And Jean-Baptiste thrives on seeing all the parts come together in her students before they head off to their next phase of education.

“My biggest reward is seeing the kids enjoy learning,” she said. “It is hard to enjoy learning these days. The way the curriculum is changing is great for them; it’s really going to prepare them for college. But some of it is kind of boring. I strive to help them get interested in it. I love to see kids happy in school.”

Wellington Education

Story by Chris Felker

Photos by ???

It’s a safe bet that Daleen Torres won’t ever suffer from empty nest syndrome, even though her children are now grown and on their own. Torres tends a nest of fledgling Spanish speakers daily for most of the year, as a teacher of Advanced Placement and Cambridge Program classes at Palm Beach Central High School.

Torres started out as a Palm Beach County School District substitute teacher back in 1998. She later became a permanent substitute before being promoted to a full-time teaching position. Now Torres is head of the World Languages Department at PBCHS.

“I grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to the [mainland] United States when I was 27,” she recalled, noting that it was her husband Francisco Rivera’s idea. “Of course, I was a good wife. I followed him. I had gone to the University of Puerto Rico, and my career was as a social worker.”

Married for just a few years at the time and with two young children, Torres began her time in Wellington was stay-at-home mother. She soon made friends with a neighbor, who began encouraging her to find a part-time job so that she could exercise her education and get some time out of the house.

“It was at a Christmas party at her house, with some other friends, and they said they were looking for substitute teachers,” Torres said. “She knew that I had a bachelor’s degree — not in education, but I have a bachelor’s, and that’s what you need to be a substitute. So I went and applied, and I got the job.”

Torres started out as an elementary school substitute, teaching a little bit of everything. “I tried to, of course, do some Spanish, and I taught math,” she said. “I worked in ESE (Exceptional Student Education) programs at an elementary school, and also at Wellington High School.”

Eventually, a perfect opportunity arose. “I applied to be a permanent Spanish substitute teacher at WHS, and that’s how I actually opened my doors,” Torres said. “I decided to certify myself [to be a full-time teacher], so I was going to school and working at the same time.”

Torres completed that program in 2003 and received her permanent teacher certification. In 2007, she became national board certified in world languages, and a short time later became department head, where she now oversees eight other teachers.

Even as a supervisor, she is still fully hands-on. “I’m teaching five classes, but one of them is a combo, so that would give me six,” Torres said. “All my classes are college-level.”

She is very proud of her work with the Cambridge Program.

“It’s an international examination program, including not only world languages, but all the subjects, and we are one of the schools that offers this program,” Torres said. “We have been very successful. The first year we offered the program, as related to world languages, we offered pre-courses getting the students ready to move on into college-credit classes. We still offer some of the Advanced Placement courses here, and I actually also teach those courses in advanced Spanish.”

And these courses are not just for juniors or seniors. “Actually, the program is open for kids that are already maturing and they’re college-bound,” Torres explained, noting that Cambridge classes are open to freshmen, and at the AP level, there are actually more 10th and 11th graders.

“In one of the highest courses for Spanish, the advanced level, that includes leadership — those are more for juniors and seniors,” she said. “So it’s a combination.”

But Torres aims to be far more than just a Spanish teacher to her students. She sees herself as a mentor, encouraging their potential.

“I try to encourage kids where we see they have potential, but they haven’t considered themselves to be college-bound,” she said. “When we see their talent, we encourage them to participate in the program, and some of them have continued in different classes after that.”

Torres tries to explain to her students how important it is to follow up on their studies in today’s fast-paced world.

“Many of my students who go to college minor in Spanish while they study nursing, business or other fields,” she said. “They understand how important it is to be bilingual right now. We are a multicultural society, particularly in Florida.”

Torres recommends that her students continue their Spanish studies after high school.

“You don’t learn a language in four or five years; you keep learning something new every day,” she said. “And I use myself as an example, because, of course, I have a strong accent. I’m aware of that, and sometimes I mispronounce [words in English]. I’m aware of that, but I learn new vocabulary all the time.”

Asked about the greatest reward she gets out of her career, Torres cites the fledglings coming back to the nest as full-plumed adults on a trajectory to success.

“Before Thanksgiving, I had one of my world language students come back — and this is an American student telling me he’s holding Spanish conversations through Skype,” she said. “He’s actually using the language and talking, and he came back to thank all the teachers. He was telling me how much he had gained… Those things keep you going.”

Her biggest reward?

“When I see my kids actually learning something that really has gained them some proficiency,” Torres said. “When they pass the test, I feel like a proud mother.”

This year’s Wellington Education series profiles some of the many educators who are expanding the minds of today’s students and tomorrow’s leaders.

Wellington Education

Western Academy Principal Linda Terranova Proud Of Her Students’ Success

Story by Chris Felker

Photos by Abner Pedraza

Linda Terranova’s success in running one of Palm Beach County’s oldest charter schools is remarkable, especially considering the fact that she actually schooled herself in how to pull it off.

Terranova got her own education in Florida’s public schools (for which charters have been designed as an alternative) and Florida’s university system. She started the process to establish Western Academy Charter School in 2001. It opened in 2003 as the first charter school in the western communities, mandated by its founding papers to serve students in Wellington, Royal Palm Beach, the Acreage/Loxahatchee area and western Lake Worth. The school serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

For prospective students and their parents, the academy’s web site lists its considerable advantages — 17 of them. Among its top achievements are the fact that Western Academy has been an A-rated school according to Florida Department of Education standards as measured by standardized tests for going on 10 consecutive years, it has been cited as an FDOE High Performing Charter School since 2011 and it has earned the state’s 5-Star School rating for connections with the community every year since 2010.

As Terranova pointed out, Western Academy stands alone locally with that last designation.

“We were the first, and are the only, school in Palm Beach County that is 5-Star rated. And it really is outstanding, not to be bragging, to maintain an A for that long,” she said. “In our state scores last year on the FSA (Florida Standards Assessment), the new test, we beat the district and the state at every single grade level for every single test.”

Those successes for the not-for-profit school make Terranova very proud, especially since she not only founded Western Academy, but also has served as its principal since the school’s second year of existence. She had to go back to school for that, having never been even a teacher, much less a CEO of any sort.

Terranova is quick to credit the team behind the scenes who helped her get Western Academy up and running, but her passion has been key to the school’s success. That much is apparent in how she describes her beginning in the charter-school movement and what she has done at Western Academy.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in mass communications/advertising with a minor in business management from the University of South Florida in Tampa in the 1980s, she worked in advertising for nine years, meanwhile getting married and starting a family. Her older son, Vinny, 19, who graduated from Palm Beach Central High School last year, has a disability. He and his brother, Joey, now a senior at Wellington High School, both graduated from Western Academy. Terranova cites Vinny as the reason for her second career.

“He has Asperger’s syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum. He was in some of the pre-K programs at Wellington Elementary School… but I quickly realized once he went into kindergarten and mainstream classes that they were not going to be able to support his needs,” Terranova recalled. “The only option was putting him in an autistic unit, which was very restricted at the time. I wasn’t happy with that for my child because he is very smart, he could learn. He didn’t have behavioral issues  — he just needed more time and more patience.”

That’s when Terranova got involved in the charter school movement.

“I met some women who were involved in charter schools,” she said. “They told me about it; I educated myself; and that’s when I looked into it with the school district. I started writing the application in 2001.”

Western Academy began as a small operation. “We started with one class of each grade, kindergarten through eighth,” Terranova explained. “We had 157 students initially in a 10,000-square-foot building, and quickly realized that there was a much greater need in this community for a school like ours. At one point, our waiting list was up to 700 people. We’ve done four expansions over the years, and now we have 460 kids and 41,000 square feet.”

Growing pains were difficult at first. “The first couple of years were very stressful, setting up procedures and undergoing constant changes,” Terranova said, especially after the school’s principal left after the first year. “We started a search for a new principal our second year, and the board asked me to step in as an interim leader.”

After interviewing principal prospects, the board ended up asking Terranova to stay on.

“The board asked me to go back and get the necessary certification and take over and run the school,” she said. “So that’s what I did. I enrolled in Lynn University and went to get my master’s degree in educational leadership. That took me a little over a year; it was a huge learning curve for me.”

Terranova immersed herself in all the academic studies, professional development and educational skill classes she could, becoming versed on the latest teaching techniques.

Two innovative programs that she instituted have contributed greatly to students’ outstanding scores. One is the Project CHILD (Changing How Instruction for Learning is Delivered) mode of instruction used in kindergarten through fifth-grade classes, in which the kids stay with the same teachers and the same group of kids for three years.

“This is great because the teachers are becoming specialists in those benchmarks for their subjects,” Terranova said. “It’s three 90-minute rotations, instead of hour classes, so they can really have a lot of time to jump into learning.”

The school has been a K-5 Project CHILD National Demonstration Site since 2011.

In middle-school classes, interdisciplinary teaching teams are used for all core content. Another special program is the middle school STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) Academy, which was began last year for high-level students and will finish rolling out for all eighth-grade classes next year.

Terranova finds her second career in education to be extremely rewarding.

“I know we’re making a difference. I know we’re providing a high-quality education to these students who walk in our door every day,” she said. “We’re making it happen. We’re not taking in these Level 5 students; we’re creating these Level 5 students at our school. My teachers are doing that every day under my leadership.”

Western Academy Charter School is located at 650 Royal Palm Beach Blvd., Suite 400, in Royal Palm Beach. To learn more, call (561) 792-4123 or visit www.westernacademycharter.com.