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JAMES P ERRY
Joey Berrios ’07, a 10th grade English teacher at Fort Smith’s Northside High—which has students of more ethnicities speaking more languages than any other high school in the state, along with a poverty rate of more then 70%—feels exactly that desire. “It’s rewarding,” he says, “to work with students from difficult family situations, poverty situations, and see the difference you can make, see them jump two or three grade levels in their reading skills. Sometimes students come back, and they’re in college. That’s encouraging, and that’s why I want to stay at Northside.” Berrios is just one of four UA Fort Smith-trained English teachers at Northside.
Breaking Molds Innovation is also key to excellent teaching, and James Perry ’06 breaks every mold he can. When he went to the advising
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BELL TOWER fall/winter 2010
K ELLY B ISBY P ETERSON
’07
’06
office to change his major to early childhood education, he recalls, his advisor looked at him and said, “You know that’s all women, right?” She wasn’t exaggerating; Perry was the only man out of 60 students in the program. Now, at Sunnymede Elementary in Fort Smith, he runs what he calls “Mr. Perry’s Boot Camp,” a high-energy, camo-curtained classroom full of third-graders who never know exactly what they’re going to see next but can’t wait to see it—stuff like the “Hulk hands” to demonstrate strong verbs. In his first year teaching, Perry won the Shelby Breedlove Outstanding Young Educator Award from the Fort Smith Jaycees. And then there’s Kelly Bisby Peterson ’07, who led a sort of academic revolution at Fort Smith’s Northside High, implementing a program to increase the number of high scores on AP (Advanced Placement) exams. The effort, funded by a grant from the Arkansas Advanced Initiative for Math and Science, involves teacher training, weekend tutoring, and a variety of incentives, like pizza and door prizes at tutoring sessions. In English AP courses, where Peterson oversaw program implementation, enrollment roughly quadrupled. “Instead of saying, ‘You can take AP if you want to, but it’s going to be really hard,’” Peterson says, “we were saying, ‘Don’t you want to challenge yourself?’” The answer was yes. “The entire culture of the school changed within a year,” Peterson says. “It was amazing seeing these kids walking into that AP test with confidence in