Extended School Contextual Factors

Mill Stream Middle School is a Title I school that was built in 2001, so everything is still very nice and new. The use of technology in the classrooms is a huge step up from my student teaching location, as all the teachers have document cameras and Smart Boards, and there are many classroom sets of books in my supervising teacher's room. However, since they are Title I, I have to keep in mind that 73% of students are on free or reduced lunch, as the 7th grade counselor told us, so even though the school looks affluent, the students are not. The student population of Mill Stream is 51% White, 40.6% Hispanic, 2.9% Asian, 2.3% Native American, 1.6% Black, and 1.6% other (ODE website, 2009). There is a large support staff, with 4 part time counselors, a CARE team, a Youth Service Team, a Community Outreach Specialist, special education staff, ESL staff, TAG staff, and various district support personnel who come around as needed. There is a very strong network of programs to support students, such as mentoring groups, peer mediation groups, a grief counseling group, and various community building groups, so there are many places to send students with home life problems. I think this creates a very supportive environment for the students, and it creates multiple communities for the students to belong to.

However, there is an undercurrent of competition at the school that occasionally boils over into ugliness at assemblies. The Mill Stream football team was undefeated until about a week ago, so they considered themselves the top dogs in middle school football, and openly scorn all other schools and their teams. This focus on their football team means that they have no basketball, and no soccer. I have also heard from some of the teachers that they value the male sports teams, such as football and wrestling, much more than the female sports teams, such as volleyball. Actually, volleyball is the only female sport that they have, besides the cross country co-ed options. This spirit of competition is the only gimmick the administration seems to use to motivate students for activities, and I directly noticed this directly in the last assembly I attended, where they pitted the teachers against each other divided by whether they were Ducks or Beavers fans, and made them compete in a tug-of-war. After the tug-of-war, they tried to tie it to their food drive, which they have made into a competition between the grade levels. The only thing it really did was make the kids behave horribly towards each other and horribly toward the teachers, and whipped them into such a frenzy, they were almost rioting for the last ten minutes of the day. The teachers in my section don't coach any sports, so they don't feel as strongly about the sports teams, but the general aura of competitiveness of both the staff and students makes me nervous.