Contact: Lisa Deffendall • First Posted: Monday, September 20, 2010

World-class education has taken on a whole new meaning at Tates Creek Middle School, where students and staff were recently granted official status as an “International Baccalaureate” school.

First established to ensure that the children of diplomats had access to a unified and challenging curriculum no matter where they lived, the International Baccalaureate Programme has grown into a network of 3,050 schools in 139 countries. Gaining IB status is a difficult process, requiring a redesign of course offerings, extensive professional development and the adoption of instructional practices that tie learning to real-world problem solving and international understanding.

Only 380 schools in the United States offer the Middle Years Programme. Tates Creek is the first in the state of Kentucky.  The IB Programme includes components for elementary, middle and high school students.  Tates Creek High School is one of five high school programs in the state.

Developed for students 11 to 16, the middle years offering provides a framework of academic challenge that encourages students to embrace and understand the connections between traditional subjects and the real world, and become critical and reflective thinkers.

Unlike the high school IB Programme, which targets select students, the middle school offering is for the entire school.

Principal Greg Quenon said that was one of the things that attracted his leadership team to IB.

“We liked that it was a whole school approach, that it was for all kids,” he said. “We were excited that it didn’t separate our kids into a program within the school, but it included every single kid in our school in the program. That goes back to our core belief we have here that every kid matters.”

All students at Tates Creek Middle School take eight courses a year. In addition to the four core subjects of reading, math, social studies and science, kids have performing arts, foreign language, technology, and physical education and health.

“IB is about teaching the whole kid,” Quenon said.  “If you go back to what middle school kids need because of their physical, mental and social development, it’s in synch with the developmental stages our kids are going through.”

Tates Creek Middle began looking into becoming an IB school in 2006.  Their evolution has included adopting IB philosophies and curriculum offerings, and sending faculty members for training in IB instructional styles. So far, 40 percent of the teachers have been trained.

Within each course, teachers help students connect their learning to health and social education, community and service, human ingenuity, approaches to learning, and environments.

“It’s given us an identity. We’re an IB school,” Quenon said. “It has helped us raise our student achievement because it has given us the vehicle to implement change at Tates Creek. Even if we were not going to become an IB school, we would be doing a lot of these same things to raise student achievement. It actually mirrored what we wanted to do. We wanted to make sure we were increasing rigor and challenging students in the classroom.”