How does a Philly neighborhood school compete globally? Thurgood Marshall is making an Olympic vault.

Early on in Jayla Blount’s elementary school career, lessons were too simple, she said.

“Everything was too easy to figure out,” said Blount, now 13 and in eighth grade at Thurgood Marshall Elementary. “The curriculum wasn’t on a high enough level for me personally. I got through it too fast.”

But things have changed at her school in recent years. Thurgood Marshall, on N. Sixth Street in Olney, moved to join the International Baccalaureate program, adopting a rigorous international curriculum framework for its middle grades in an effort to accelerate student learning.

Adopting IB is a leap for any school. For a school in the nation’s poorest big city, in a district that has been underfunded for decades, educating a student body that’s largely economically disadvantaged, with one in four students requiring special education services and one in five an English language learner, it was an Olympic vault.

But Brian Meadows, who became the school’s principal in 2019, felt strongly that if Thurgood Marshall’s students were given the proper conditions, they would soar.

“I wanted to create a school of excellence in a majority minority neighborhood,” said Meadows. “No matter what the neighborhood looks like, feels like, our students are able to rise to the occasion, to be great.”

Thurgood Marshall is now just one of 10 district schools that offer IB.

Central, George Washington, Northeast, Girls’ High and Hill-Freedman and Bodine high schools offer the IB diploma; Hill-Freedman, Mayfair Elementary, and Castor Gardens Middle School offer the middle years program; and Mayfair offers the primary years program. A.S. Jenks, in Chestnut Hill, plans to become a full-fledged IB school next fall.

The process of achieving IB status was not simple.

Philadelphia schools’ discretionary budgets are notoriously tight, and Meadows had to be strategic and set aside fees for IB candidacy and teacher training. (Pandemic relief funds helped, he said.)

Initially, Meadows had wanted Thurgood Marshall to be all in, to adopt the IB primary years model for grades K-4 and middle years for 5-8, but that wasn’t possible financially, so he had to make a choice.

After two years of candidacy, Thurgood Marshall became a full-fledged IB Middle Years Programme school this year.

What does that look like?

IB programs are designed to challenge students, but also to encourage them to think about the larger world around them, to never walk away from a lesson thinking, “how does this apply to real life?” That means lots of projects with practical applications, and lessons designed with big goals in mind. Many neighborhood schools struggle to offer any world language or Algebra I; Thurgood Marshall offers algebra, Spanish, and French.

Fifth graders might tackle the problem of litter in their neighborhood not just through discussion, but by collecting trash, then upcycling it to build a table they use to play chess and checkers.

A sixth grade lesson about ratios and proportions might become a project evaluating the battery life of commonly used devices, ending with a student presentation to parents or administrators about the ideal computer or cell phone a school or family might use moving forward.

Before they graduate, Thurgood Marshall students must choose a project of their own interest, conducting their own research, making connections to the community, then presenting it at the end of the year.

“We want them to have an impact on what’s going on in their school and their communities,” said TiQuann Jett-Jamison, the school’s seventh and eighth grade science and design teacher. “Through IB, it allows us to virtually branch off to other parts of the world.”

It’s too early to say whether the IB experiment will help lift the school’s achievement — in the 2022-23 school year, 17% of students met state benchmarks in English as measured by standardized tests, and 8% met math goals. But several Thurgood Marshall students who are veterans of the program say they love the changes.

“I just like how we do a lot more hands-on stuff, a lot more group projects,” said Blount. She’s learning about Latin American folklore, connecting what she’s reading in novels to things in her life, she said.

“Everything is just more interesting,” said Aighnya Wagner, 12, a seventh grader.

“We’re learning about different religions and cultures, and that’s so cool,” said Raena Miller, 13, an eighth grader.

As a Philadelphia School District school, Thurgood Marshall must still use the district’s curriculum, but teachers work to infuse it into an IB framework.

“It has been a hard lift,” said Luciana Boone, the school’s IB coordinator. “The back-end work before it even comes in front of the students is a lot.”

Pivoting to IB required personnel changes; some teachers weren’t fans of the model.

“I had a core group of people who believed, but how that looked and how much work you were willing to put in, that looked different,” Meadows said. “It was just constantly re-emphasizing and reminding ourselves, ‘Our kids can, our kids will.’”

When Thurgood Marshall began to shift middle grades instruction to IB coursework, the adults were more resistant than students, Meadows said. Some students complained, but though “it’s more work, but they saw it aligned with excellent teaching.”

The program has evolved; when Meadows first began moving Thurgood Marshall toward IB, the IB coordinator had to juggle that job with teaching. Now, the IB coordinator has no teaching load on top of that job, and that position is paid for by the district, not out of the school’s budget.

Meadows has moved on from Thurgood Marshall; he’s been promoted to deputy chief of the district’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction. But the school, and IB, remain close to his heart, and he’s pulling for its sustainability, for it to propel students to access top city high schools, colleges and careers, to compete globally, to partner with IB schools from around the world.

For Sarah Morrell, Thurgood Marshall’s school-based teacher leader for middle grades and the math and algebra teacher for fifth through eighth grade, it’s a matter of equity.

“Our scholars deserve that high quality education — the same as any child in any country, any district,” said Morrell. “They deserve that exposure.”