Pease, Crockett to complete IB pipeline

May 3—In the next couple of years, Ector County ISD will have a complete International Baccalaureate pipeline from elementary through high school with the addition of Pease Elementary and Crockett Middle schools.

Crockett will start its IB program in the 2024-25 school year and Pease in the 2025-26 school year.

Odessa High School has offered the IB program for many years.

The curriculum includes community service, leadership skills, project-based learning and a foreign language, among other components.

While Pease will be a choice school, neighborhood kids can also take advantage of the curriculum.

According to the International Baccalaureate website, the IB Primary Years Programme is for children age 3-12.

"(It) nurtures and develops young students as caring, active participants in a lifelong journey of learning," the site said.

Pease Principal Micah Arrott said the 2024-25 school year will be used for planning, teacher and principal training.

They will also look at the curriculum and see how to adjust it to fit the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme requirements.

Arrott said they will then roll out the program for '25-26 after they receive approval from the International Baccalaureate organization.

Next year, Pease will return to being a pre-K through five campus.

In 2018, for accountability purposes, the board combined the attendance zones and reconfigured the grade-levels for Pease/Noel and Zavala/Travis elementary schools.

This change meant Pease served the students in prekindergarten through second and Noel served the same students in third through fifth grades, with the same arrangement for Zavala (prekindergarten — second) and Travis (3rd — 5th grades).

"Today, all four campuses are in good academic standing and the opportunity exists to bring these elementary families back together into one building" according to district information.

Pease has been providing blended learning, a combination of face-to-face and digital learning, so Arrott said teachers were wondering if they would still offer that with the IB program coming in.

"I feel honored to have been chosen. I feel like the teachers have really put in the work for years showing that they're able to change and adjust. I think it's scary because we all want to do it so well. But the staff has really embraced a growth mindset and so I feel like it's that little piece of the puzzle that we're missing that is just going to be so spectacular for the kids because it's a worldly way of thinking instead of just Odessa, Texas, area type of thinking," Arrott said.

The IB program will be school wide, not just for high achievers.

"It's for all learners ... What I've found since I've been down at pre-K is that this is really where they're just like sponges, and if you're going to teach them to think in a particular way, whether it's a foreign language, or whether it's blended (learning) ... that's when they just soak it up like a sponge. If you're going to lay the foundation for them to be able to be successful in a high school IB program, then it just makes sense that it would happen in elementary," she added.

Blended learning and IB will go together cohesively because blended learning is good personalized instruction.

"The IB program is a lot of project-based instruction. ... You can do project-based instruction within a blended learning classroom, so those those two together I think are really going to be what our kids over here on the west side deserve," Arrott said.

She added that there is no elementary choice school on that side of town.

Arrott said Superintendent Scott Muri mentioned the district was looking toward a primary years IB program in his State of the District address, but a campus had not been chosen at that time. Pease was selected.

"I was pleasantly surprised, not just because it was my campus, but because to me, it makes sense because Crockett is the middle school and Crockett feeds into OHS," Arrott said.

She added that it also makes sense for Pease to go back to being pre-K through fifth grade.

"I'm ecstatic because it's just exciting for the kids, the neighborhood kids. These kids deserve that. We could be changing the trajectory of their academics from now on and that's exciting to me," Arrott said.

Associate Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Lilia Nanez said this is what the district has been working toward.

"ECISD continues to look to offer the best for our families. The opportunity for the Primary Years and Middle Years Programme adds a worldwide perspective to education. Since we are the heart of the petroleum industry in this part of the world, it makes perfect sense to prepare our students to have this opportunity so they can engage with others across the globe," Nanez said.

As part of its progression toward primary years IB, Arrott said they will be hiring an International Baccalaureate coordinator who will work closely with the Pease instructional leadership team to make sure the curriculum aligns with the IB requirements.

Pease's capacity is 800 students and the campus is projected to have about 700 students next year.

"That will be interesting to see after next year because it will be a lottery-type of enrollment as a choice school. It will be interesting to see what that looks like," and how families want to take advantage of the IB program, Arrott said.

After they get an IB coordinator in place, Arrott said they plan to look into educating parents about the IB program and what it can do for students not just in their elementary years, but beyond.

Having the program at the elementary level allows students and parents to decide if IB is for them and if they want to continue.

The global perspective also will be beneficial, Arrott said.

"We are over 80% low socio-economic (students) here at Pease. A lot of our students don't get that worldly exposure. They don't get a lot of experiences outside of our town. To be able to give them those experiences through school, it's just exciting. It could give them opportunities and create opportunities and ways of thinking, pushing them beyond what they think they can do, what they've been exposed to. That's how you change lives for kids. That's how you change generational lack of opportunities in education," Arrott said.