Small Knights Ferry School wins state’s Gold Ribbon honor

Knights Ferry School brought home the gold, the only school in Stanislaus County named a 2016 California Gold Ribbon School.

The award is given to showcase great ideas other schools can try, which for Knights Ferry was wrapping lessons in and around the tiny town, said Principal Janet Skulina.

“It’s really a very nice symbiotic relationship between the school and the community,” said Skulina, who is also superintendent of the one-school, 11-employee Knights Ferry School District. With the school secretary out sick last week, she bobbed between her office and the front desk, taking lunch orders and tending a student’s itchy mosquito bites.

Everyone wears multiple hats at the school, which with 100 students outstrips the town itself, population 98. Roughly half of the student body drives in each morning from elsewhere. The school has no buses, not that they could manage the twists and turns up to the hilltop campus anyway.

The school custodian is also groundskeeper and lunch lady. Every teacher teaches a combined class of two grades, with aides helping them split their time between the two. The aides double as librarian and band director.

Parents also pitch in, with a bilingual couple leading the Spanish club. Another parent teaches sign language. A parent with a beekeeping business brings a demonstration hive. The Parent Teacher Club funds field trips.

“Because we’re so small, we’re trying to tap different skills around us,” Skulina said.

The first-year principal is a big believer in place-based education, an emerging trend that basically tells schools to bloom where they are planted.

This year, the students picked pears donated by seniors and canned them, learning from their mistakes how oxidation happens. They made art projects and poems about the fruit, wrapping English lessons into the science.

Kids decorated pumpkins for communitywide trick-or-treating on Halloween. Seventh- and eighth-graders pitched in to prep the food for a free community Thanksgiving lunch feast – a long-standing tradition – at the Knights Ferry Community Club with community members.

“Our community volunteers, most of them went to this school. They know the kids. They’re invested in the school,” Skulina said, adding that the school has virtually no attendance or discipline issues. “Everybody knows everybody.”

The Stanislaus River, which winds along the edge and through the history of the town, played a starring role in many lessons. The students raised salmon, studying the eggs as they hatched and later releasing them one by one into the river from mason jars.

Putting lessons in and around the community gives them greater staying power. “Besides, it’s fun!” Skulina said. “Kids like to get out of the classroom.”

The Gold Ribbon honor says the state agrees.

“These schools shine as bright beacons for others, putting forth an exemplary effort to ensure that every student is ready for 21st-century college and careers,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said in announcing the awards. “California teachers are developing an education model for the nation, training the students of today to be the problem-solvers, inventors and pioneers of tomorrow.”

The California Gold Ribbon Schools Award honors schools in place of the assessment-linked California Distinguished Schools Program, which is on hiatus until the state has new a school scoring program in place. This year, the program recognized elementary schools. Last year, the award went to middle and high schools.

Schools applied for the award based on a program or practice their school has adopted that could be a model for other schools to try.

This story was originally published April 29, 2016 at 8:11 PM with the headline "Small Knights Ferry School wins state’s Gold Ribbon honor."