La Cumbre Junior High Looks to Bridge Gap for Santa Barbara’s International Baccalaureate Students

La Cumbre Junior High is preparing to link what students learn in the classroom to what they may experience in the larger world. The school, with a Middle Years Program, was the missing link for International Baccalaureate (IB) students in the Santa Barbara Unified School District. 

The pathway starts with Harding Elementary and ends with Dos Pueblos High School. Once La Cumbre is authorized, the three schools will create the first TK-12 IB continuum in the district. 

Middle Years programs encompass the whole school, to prepare students for the more selective and rigorous IB Diploma and Career Programs they can apply to as juniors and seniors in high school. 

Students can receive an IB diploma alongside their normal high school diploma if they complete the program, which combines classroom study, independent projects and research, and community service learning. In addition, colleges often award credits for IB courses. 

Living in a changing global economy “post-pandemic,” students will need to be equipped to think critically, think creatively, and work collaboratively, said Bradley Brock, principal of La Cumbre. In turn, though, they need to be supported socially, emotionally, and cognitively.

“When we look at the whole child, we start to reimagine what success looks like — we are asking for deeper engagement with our students,” Brock said. 

Brock referred to the IB program as a “great first step” in fostering an educational experience that is inquiry-based and provides depth to learning; based on eight subject groups, students will learn “in context” of the world around them, with an emphasis on conceptual understanding, and including interdisciplinary units and a long-term project. 

It is supposed to encourage students to take agency over their education, where teachers help facilitate learning and inquiry, rather than taking center stage. “Teachers, too, will need to think differently,” Brock added. “I think it will really allow them to take a radical shift in their collective mindset as well.”

Teachers will be expected to collaborate across disciplines to bridge subjects that might otherwise be separated by the bell schedule. Parents will also have a more active role — instead of parent conferences, they’ll attend “exhibitions,” where they’ll be a part of a “public display of mastery by their children,” in Brock’s words. 

Over the next two to three years, the district will be supporting La Cumbre as the school works toward authorization through a “candidacy” process to meet IB standards, including professional development and gradually building in components of the program. 

In addition, the school will have a consultant from the IB organization to help shepherd them through the process, which they are starting this year. The candidacy process, including the application, costs around $15,000 while annual fees for authorized schools are a little more than $10,000.  

However, there is no cookie-cutter model for IB schools, and each is able to build its own model, based on its own “learner profile” — an assessment of 10 attributes such as “knowledgeable,” “caring,” and “reflective.”

“I think the learner profile is a way for the community to tell a story about what type of learner they want to produce,” Brock said. “And learner profiles for International Baccalaureate is really a common language that builds character for all students.”

At Harding, teachers implementing the new Wit and Wisdom literacy curriculum have a head start because making connections between new information and a broader knowledge base, as the curriculum advises, is “part of being an IB school,” said Lynne Sheffield, the Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services.

“The teachers have got that ingrained in their fiber of how they work and teach in the classroom,” she added.

Filling in the final stepping stone in the district’s IB pathway is directly correlated to what the district is working toward overall, Sheffield said. “The way that we’re looking at addressing our students and school this year, we’re talking about the ABCs — academic, belonging, community, and collaboration — feeds right into what the IB learner profile speaks to and the way we want our students to learn.”