The pieces of an elaborate puzzle are falling into place for a middle school in Akron that promises not just a new building, but truly a new school, conceived in every detail from the ground up with the best research available.

The new math, science and technology middle school adjacent to the National Inventors Hall of Fame will be exceptional for three reasons:

• It's a middle school. Most STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) initiatives are at the high school level.

• It will serve fifth- through eighth-graders of all abilities, including special education students, not just the whiz kids.

• Its every detail is the result of a collaboration by Akron Public Schools, the city of Akron, the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the University of Akron, which will place college students who want to become math and science teachers in the middle school's classrooms.

Groundbreaking is expected in June, with staff hires completed by next January and a fall 2009 opening.

Akron's failing test scores show that middle schoolers need more than a new building.

Of Akron's nine traditional middle schools, only one, Hyre, has ever passed a state math test in any year at any grade. Not one of them passed science in the last school year.

Akron's 10th middle school, Miller South, a magnet school specializing in the performing arts, is rated excellent and passed all its standards last year.

The district has long envisioned a school that would encourage science, technology and math the way Miller South embraces art, music, dance and drama.

Planning began in earnest after Akron voters approved adding a quarter percentage point to the city income tax in 2003 to help leverage state money for school construction.

Akron is about halfway through the resulting $800 million construction project that will shut down, renovate or replace every school in the district.

One of the first decisions was whether the STEM effort should be a middle school or a high school.

''That was a big discussion and the discussion really came to the middle school,'' said Maryann Wolowiec, the school district manager who has coordinated the project since January 2007.

''We lose them in middle school,'' said Wolowiec, the former Hudson school superin-tendent whose background includes math

and chemistry. ''By the time you get them
to high school, you're trying almost to
recover them or get them back because
kids make those decisions early on.''

National math report

Akron's choice looks prescient considering the final report of President Bush's National Mathematics Advisory Panel, which was released last month.

''The sharp falloff in mathematics achievement in the U.S. begins as students reach later middle school, where, for more and more students, algebra course work begins,'' the report says.

Bush created the panel in 2006 to improve math education in response to findings that ''American students achieve in mathematics at a mediocre level by comparison to peers worldwide.''

The report determined that America's math education system ''is broken and must be fixed'' and focused on how to better prepare students for Algebra I, which is typically taught in eighth grade.

The report calls for a cease-fire in the all-or-nothing ''math wars'' waged by people who advocate one approach to the exclusion of all others.

''To prepare students for algebra, the curriculum must simultaneously develop conceptual understanding, computational fluency, and problem-solving skills. Debates regarding the relative importance of these aspects of mathematical knowledge are misguided,'' the report says.

Steve Miller, the Akron district's mathematics learning specialist who oversees K-12 curriculum, agrees with the panel's conclusion.

Facts and concepts

Basic facts are important and parents can and should help their children master them, he said.

But students also must understand the mathematical concepts behind the facts, such as fractions, proportional reasoning, equivalence (the significance of the equals sign) and the variable (the idea that a letter such as X stands as a placeholder for a number or multiple numbers in an equation).

''If all you teach are the basic facts, you haven't gone far enough with it and it won't get you to algebra,'' Miller said.

He is involved heavily with the developing math curriculum for the new middle school.

To enroll, students and parents must write statements of interest in science and math. Selection will be based on two lotteries, one for the 80 percent who will come from Akron schools and one for the 20 percent who can enroll from other districts.

''There's a lot of procedures involved in mathematics,'' Miller said. ''Only a certain group of kids in the past just understood those and moved on. We now have the challenge of teaching all kids mathematics and some of them can't move on until they can understand conceptually.''

A common fallacy

Miller is working against a common fallacy identified in the panel's report that math is only for the natural-born genius.

''This is a critical point because much of the public's self-evident resignation about mathematics education (together with the common tendencies to dismiss weak achievement and give up early) seems rooted in the erroneous idea that success is largely a matter of inherent talent or ability, not effort,'' the report says.

Riedinger Middle School math teacher Sam Crews, who is helping develop the new middle school, puts it more plainly:

''Math is feared, not revered at all — other than the man,'' he said, gesturing to the poster of Albert Einstein hanging on his seventh-grade classroom wall. ''That's what we're trying to change.''

One of his students this year, 13-year-old Jaytyler Ruple, said he struggled with math until he had Crews as a teacher. Now math is his favorite subject, which is fortunate, because Jaytyler wants to be an architect.

''I had a little trouble with multiplication, division, square roots and all that, but when I got to Mr. Crews, I was like, king of it,'' Ruple said. ''He made it better for me to understand. He'd break it down for us. He told me to practice.''

The new middle school aims to have all of its students complete Algebra I or its equivalent by the end of eighth grade. Much of the curriculum being developed for the school combines the best practices from research and from what's already been proven successful in the district and brings it all under one roof.

''There's always going to be pockets of excellence,'' Wolowiec said. ''What we're trying to do is intentionally make this all happen for all the teachers and all the students all the time.''

Students also will learn language arts, social studies, history, world language and fine arts as well as 21st-century subjects such as digital technology.

Museum renovation

The school will be built on the north side of the Inventors Hall of Fame between the museum's familiar sail and the Morley Health Center. A portion of the museum will be renovated for the school.

''Linking up with an organization like the Inventors Hall of Fame is a great move,'' said George Viebranz, executive director of the Ohio Mathematics and Science Coalition. ''It really connects the academic preparation of students with work-force development and the way those concepts are used on a day in, day out basis.''

While the school and museum will have separate entrances, students will be able to see invention exhibits on the museum side that the Inventors Hall of Fame will produce for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Those exhibits will be rotated between Akron and the national patent office in Washington.

Flexible facility

The arrangement of classrooms keeps each grade on its own level and emphasizes flexibility and collaboration.

The rooms include movable, soundproof floor-to-ceiling walls that can be opened to provide opportunities for team teaching.

The school day will begin at 7:30 and end at 5:30, with extra time built into the schedule to make sure kids have enough help on the tough subjects.

''We're building in the time to make sure that the kids are prepared by eighth grade,'' Wolowiec said.

The school's success won't depend on an outstanding teacher or principal.

''In order for it to be sustainable and going on forever, it has to be designed such that it is part of the system,'' Wolowiec said. ''It can't be person-dependent.''

Akron taxpayers are covering about half of the $14.5 million price tag, with the state paying the other half. Like the other schools in the project, the new middle school will be used after hours as a community center.

The city also wants to help build a local work force capable of serving the high-tech companies it is seeking to attract through projects such as a biomedical corridor.

Private donations

William Considine, president of Akron Children's Hospital, is leading an effort to raise $15 million in private donations to pay for professional staff development, special student projects, programs such as an inventor-in-residence and ongoing investments in high-end technology.

The school board is counting on Considine to raise at least $2 million in construction-related extras that the state share won't cover.

Crews, the Riedinger math teacher, believes so many people have a stake in the school's success that it cannot fail. ''We're not just throwing a bunch of money in a building and calling it a math and science building and having it be a flop,'' Crews said. ''There's a real concerted effort here to get the best people, to have the best resources and to have it open enough so that we'll be able to accommodate the technology that's coming.''

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