Barron Park Elementary School
800 Barron Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94306
Barron Park Elementary School is the newest elementary school in the Palo Alto Unified school district. The core staff began work in early 1998. The boundaries for the school were first approved on March 31, 1998. The actual name of the school was approved later, on April 21st. The first students began classes on September 8, 1998. The original Barron Park School opened its doors on the same site fifty years earlier.
The school enrollment was approximately 260 children in the school year 2003-2004. The approximate ethnic/racial make-up of the student body was 3% African-American, 16% Asian, 54% Caucasian, 23% Hispanic, and 3% multi-racial. Average daily attendance exceeds 95%.
Learning Environment:
"Staff, parent and student members of our learning community worked together to develop our school vision statement and core values during our first year, and revisited and reaffirmed them during the 2002-2003 school year. At Barron Park Elementary School learning is a joyful, exciting process. We help students develop responsibility for themselves, their learning, their community, and their relationships. We emphasize positive, respectful, and caring relationships in the classrooms, on the playground, and throughout the school. Barron Park students develop strong cross-age relationships in bi-weekly Constellation Groups, which stay together throughout their time in the school."
Barron Park's STAR Test Results, 2002
| Reading | Math | Language | Spelling | |
| 2nd Grade | 82 | 75 | 47 | 39 |
| 3rd Grade | 80 | 82 | 28 | 41 |
| 4th Grade | 87 | 89 | 25 | 29 |
| 5th Grade | 72 | 76 | 20 | 46 |
Scores range from 1-99. A score of 99 indicates that the school scored higher than 99 percent of the other public schools in the nation. Scores are NOT directly comparable to the older scores reported for the other schools.
Instructional Staff:
Barron Park faculty includes 16 fully credentialed classroom teachers, including four who job-share; a full-time reading specialist; and a part-time librarian, resource specialist, language/speech specialist, English Language Development teacher, and school psychologist. Instructional aides assist teachers in their classrooms several days each week. Music and P.E. instructors provide weekly classroom lessons through district programs.
Barron Park teachers are leaders in district-wide staff development efforts in literacy, math, science, and technology. One teacher has been trained by the Noyce Foundation to provide support and coaching to our staff in the teaching of writing. Our literacy, math, and science lead teachers lead workshops for4 other teachers. The technology lead teacher runs after-school and summer workshops for teachers and other staff members, and coaches individual teachers on using computers effectively in the classroom. The reading specialist coaches classroom teachers on instructional best practices.
Barron Park School Core Values:
Our goal is for Barron Park to be a place where:
we all learn. We want students and adults to continually gain knowledge and to learn in ways that are meaningful, challenging, and fun.
we respect one another. We want to be aware of our actions and the impact of our actions. We want to show respect for each other by being kind, friendly, polite, and cooperative.
we develop responsibility. We want to grow in the ways that we take care of ourselves, our work, our school and the people in it, and our environment. We want to develop independence as well as the ability to be a responsible member of a team.
we feel safe. We want to know that our school is a place where each person's whole self will be cared for and protected. We want to feel that we can trust each other enough to try new things and to be ourselves.
we feel that we belong to a community. We want to be included and accepted by the people at our school. We want to know that each of us is important. We want to feel a sense of connection and cooperation among the people at Barron Park.