Kenwood Elementary to become leadership magnet school

CEDAR RAPIDS — Kenwood Elementary School will become a leadership magnet school by the start of the 2016-2017 school year, making it the second school of its kind in the Cedar Rapids Community School District.

The soon-to-be-renamed Kenwood Leadership Academy Magnet School, a preschool through fifth-grade elementary school, will be geared toward teaching leadership skills to students.

It will remain open to students in the school's attendance zone but admit 40 to 70 additional students through a lottery, adding to the 390 children already enrolled at the school. The lottery for Kenwood will open in the spring, Pickering said.

Kenwood will be the second magnet school in the Cedar Rapids Community School District following the opening of the Johnson STEAM Academy magnet school in August, moving the district closer to offering more options to parents, said Associate Superintendent Trace Pickering. 'We really understand that parents today want lots more choices in how their children are educated, and our community wants to see us do some different things to supplement what we already do,' Pickering said.

The school will work with Franklin Covey Co., a global company that specializes in performance improvement, to implement the company's Leader in Me program, a school transformation model that teaches leadership and life skills to elementary school students. Teachers will undergo professional development to learn to incorporate leadership principles into their work and relationships with students. Students will be taught to set, track and achieve goals, hold student-led conferences, similar to parent-teacher conference but with students taking ownership for their learning and leading the conferences. The school also will give each student leadership roles within the school and hold student-led leadership events. Pickering said the school still is negotiating the cost of the transition but said it won't be 'dramatically expensive.'

The district has applied for a $15 million grant to help fund the new school as well as any magnet schools the district may want to open in the future.

'I think (this is for) parents who just are ready for their children to have a different kind of experience,' Pickering said. 'It could be parents who themselves who have benefited from really focusing on their own leadership skills, and they want their children to have that kind of focus. Magnet schools really give us that opportunity to provide parents with choice and for us to introduce new models of learning.'

The Leader in Me program has been implemented in schools across the nation, and was originally designed for a failing elementary school in South Carolina.

The district opened the Johnson STEAM Academy magnet school in August, another magnet school with emphasis on science, technology, engineering, arts and math.