By Kate Rafford ’26
The outside world seems quiet on Monday morning at 7:30 a.m.
The streets are full of cars, but they glide softly past the intersection of Lincoln Way and South Sheridan. The rising sun offers a glimpse of the long day that is to come. Meanwhile, inside three sets of high-security glass doors at Coquillard Elementary School on the West Side of South Bend, it is anything but quiet.
If students were sleepy this morning, restorative justice coach Charles Jamerson wakes them up quickly.
“Good morning, GOOOOD MOOOORNING!” Jamerson booms over the loudspeaker, starting the morning announcements. “Class, class: it is MONDAYYYYY!”
It’s a good morning for two young students, who were chosen to join Jamerson for the announcements.
“Today I am here with two special guests to remind you of the important rules,” Jamerson says, handing the microphone to the students hovering behind him. “Rule number one is…”
“Follow directions quickly,” the girl whispers to the school.
“And rule number two?”
“Raise your hand for permission to speak,” her partner mumbles.
“Raise your hand for permission to leave your seat.”
The last rule is the most important: “Keep our dear learning community happy!”
Jamerson always makes sure to end the announcements the way he started — by motivating the student body to have a good day.
“Don’t forget,” he adds, “it’s a great day to be a Coquillard Comet!”
Jamerson’s enthusiasm is contagious, and it mirrors the care that Coquillard staff and teachers have for their students. But the school’s also facing challenges. In 2025, Coquillard Elementary was ranked the worst school in the state, according to the Indiana Department of Education (1). That designation comes not because of violence or dilapidated school facilities, but because not a single one of Coquillard’s students passed the ILEARN exam, Indiana’s statewide online assessment for students in third grade and above.
Just 6.4% of Coquillard students are proficient in math, and only 7% are proficient in English/Language Arts (2). Even more concerning for the school administration was the 30.9% pass rate on the IREAD, a test determining if students have foundational reading skills. In March 2024, Indiana lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1, a law that would require schools to hold third graders who don’t pass the reading test back rather than promoting them to fourth grade (3).
This law, which is targeted at schools just like Coquillard, was meant to finally get the scores to where they needed to be, but the law also penalizes schools with low reading scores by stripping away funding (4). Similarly, the stated goal of ILEARN and IREAD tests is to keep schools accountable, but many Coquillard staff believe that evaluating schools simply based on test scores is reductive.
When asked about reading scores, Coquillard vice principal Sarah Rodriguez said that the new law has brought about challenges for the school.
“Historically, our school was not and is not doing well, when you look at our data,” Rodriguez said. “I think that sometimes the district leadership who aren’t familiar with our school might come in and try to put a bunch of quick fixes in place to solve what they perceive as the issue, but it’s a lot more complex than that.”
Coquillard has experience using many different evidence-based literacy programs, and, in the middle of the 2024-25 school year, the district wanted them to switch their curriculum back from UFLI to “Fundations,” one that previously hadn’t been successful with the unique student population at Coquillard. With Rodriguez’s advocacy, Coquillard was able to gain autonomy to choose their own curriculum after showing that their students had different needs from the rest of the district’s students.
Other issues with the South Bend Community School Corporation (SBCSC) arose when deciding how to handle the third graders who were held back. Most of the district’s schools only had a few third graders that were unable to pass the IREAD. Coquillard had close to 30 students who were unable to pass the test after repeated attempts. Despite directions from the state to retain all students who failed the test, SBCSC decided to put the retained third graders into fourth grade classes while giving them tutoring and literacy help on the side. The goal of this plan was to bring the retained third graders up to speed with literacy while learning fourth grade material so they could pass the IREAD and move onto fifth grade.
Coquillard tried to follow the district’s directions despite the conflicting messaging from the state.
“We were just finding that it was really difficult for those retained third graders to access the fourth grade curriculum in a meaningful way, so we pushed back respectfully and asked if we could have a self-contained, retained third grade class,” Rodriguez said.
In October, the district agreed.
Coquillard administrators are figuring out the kinks of the new policy as they go. Rodriguez doesn’t know if the retained third graders are going to move into fifth grade at the end of the year provided they pass the IREAD. The stakes are high for the school. If Coquillard’s students don’t pass the IREAD, Rodriguez doesn’t know if they will have to remain in third grade for a third year. She does know that if this year’s pass rates don’t improve, then the whole fate of the school might be in danger.
Coquillard Elementary opened in 1957 in the neighborhood of Beacon Heights.
Formerly known as Bendix Heights, the housing units were initially built in conjunction with the U.S. government as “defense dwellings,” places to live for those working at Bendix or Studebaker plants making engines for U.S. war planes. The area was meant to house those moving to South Bend, hoping to cash in on the success of Studebaker and Bendix (5).
Today, much of the housing in Beacon Heights is segregated, low-income housing sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The housing units, while subsidized, are dilapidated, and tenants deal with issues like leaks, bed bugs, cockroach, and mice infestations while their “irresponsible landlords” stand by, according to Councilmember Henry Davis Jr. in 2023 (6).
Coquillard Elementary opened at the end of the Studebaker era, and, after the closure of the plant, the Beacon Heights neighborhood eventually became very low-income and majority Black.
Today, 70.5% of the students at Coquillard Elementary are on free or reduced lunch, and the school struggles academically and behaviorally (2). The school is highly segregated, with Black students making up close to 80% of the student body. But that wasn’t always the case.
Ethan Marosz, the current principal intern at Coquillard Elementary, grew up in the area and has seen how it has changed over time.
“Everyone in my family besides me went here,” Marosz said, gesturing to a classroom with 30 empty desks. Two kids sat in bean bags in the corner, attempting to complete phonics worksheets with the help of constant reminders to stay on task from Marosz. “There was a time when Coquillard was the test-in school, and then the kids who didn’t test in there went to my elementary school, called Kennedy.”
When Marosz was in school, Coquillard didn’t have a problem with segregation, but Kennedy did. He remembers being one of the few white kids at his elementary school.
In 2003, President George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” Act changed the way the South Bend schools were structured. After that, Kennedy became the test-in magnet school, and Coquillard became the last resort.
In the hallway outside of Marosz’s classroom, there are class photos from over the years at Coquillard. In frames mounted on purple and blue cardstock, there are individual photos of each student and staff member from each school year. Marosz finds himself pausing his busy day of caring for students to look at these photos.
“As somebody who’s passionate about integration, you can see it,” Marosz said. “If you look at the photos of the student body in 2001 and 2010, the racial difference is apparent.”
He’s right. At the beginning of the hallway, the 2002-2003 frame hangs, showing a nearly even split between Black kids and white kids. Further down the hallway, in the 2009-2010 photographs, Black kids make up at least 75% of the student body.
According to Marosz, school segregation is at the heart of the systemic issues that Coquillard faces, despite real or performative attempts at integration. SBCSC, in accordance with a consent decree in 1980, agreed to desegregate the city’s schools “now and theoretically forever” (7). The consent decree was issued because the district was failing to comply with the mandatory integration that was codified in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and it requires that the district meet a variety of integration metrics. The most important of those metrics requires that the percentage of Black students in each school be within 15% of the total percentage of Black students in the entire district. In the 45 years since the consent decree was put in place, South Bend schools have not been able to meet this metric, and currently, Coquillard is one of the schools whose student population ensures that SBCSC is the only school corporation in Indiana with a consent decree still in place. Today, the district is still making attempts to desegregate by recruiting Black students from Coquillard and another segregated school, Muessel Elementary, to apply to magnet schools (8).
But to Marosz, magnet schools are not the solution.
“You got to those schools, their grades are better and things are running better,” Marosz said, “but it’s not because the principals are better or the staff is better. It’s because there is consistency.”
Magnet schools are much more balanced racially and economically.
“They have these PTO groups that have been there forever, so they have all these programs in place and they have a lot more financial support outside of the school. That’s when you see the light shining on these equity issues for Coquillard,” Marosz said.
With as much school choice as there is in South Bend, Marosz sees Coquillard as the last choice for families.
“The truth is,” he said, “if you have the wherewithal or the opportunity to send your kid somewhere else, you would.”
One product of under-resourced schools is behavioral issues, which Coquillard teachers deal with every day. Jenna Hill, Coquillard’s literacy coach and an expert in social emotional learning, says that behavioral issues are a product of poverty and inequity, and that affects a student’s ability to learn.
“For the students at Coquillard, poverty is a permanent status as opposed to a temporary situation,” Hill said. “From the social-emotional learning side, we need to build relationships with our students.”
Hill believes that when students are acting out, it is important to pull them aside and figure out how they are feeling. She finds that kids are taken aback when asked what they need to fix their behavior.
“I ask, is this too hard for you? Are you upset about something that happened at home? And what do we need to do to fix it?”
For some kids at Coquillard, coming to school is their safe space, and they’re successful in school because they feel cared for and safe in a way that they didn’t before. There are some kids, however, who act out at school because their home life makes it hard for them to concentrate on their schoolwork.
“If a kid is tired or hungry, then there’s not a lot of point in arguing with them about doing math,” Hill said. She and other teachers constantly have to find a balance between promoting learning and making sure each student is physically and emotionally well, which is a struggle.
Hill also finds herself frustrated by the systemic problems that affect her students.
“Has anyone done lead testing at Beacon Heights? Have we talked about the nutritional needs of our students or the socioeconomic needs of our students and how that could affect their physical health?” she asks. To her, it’s all connected, and there are so many questions that the district doesn’t want to address.
Turning around the worst school in Indiana is a community effort, but people are putting in the work.
Dr. Andrea Christensen, director of the Education, Schooling and Society department at the University of Notre Dame, is in her second year of teaching a recess coaching class at Coquillard, where her students come to help guide students into peaceful play.
Marosz says that, before the program started, he spent much of his day at recess and lunch trying to break up fights between students, and almost all of the school’s suspensions were due to incidents happening at recess. With the college students coaching recess, there are rarely disciplinary issues that happen.
In addition to the importance of discipline, Christensen sees recess itself as one of the most important activities at school, and many Coquillard students suffer from disparity of play already. Higher-income kids can afford to play sports after school, and their parents have time to take them to the park and supervise their outdoor play. For some kids at Coquillard, the 20 minutes of recess is the only opportunity they have for physical play all day.
With this in mind, for Coquillard students, taking away recess is a counterproductive punishment.
“The issues with recess are that if children get in trouble during recess, they tend to miss class time,” Christensen said. “It leads to a whole host of performance and motivation issues, and it’s not just missing class, but it’s also then having heightened emotion from getting in trouble and coming into class.”
The recess coaches’ main job is to build relationships with the kids and make sure they are engaging in safe play. Sometimes, this looks like playing four-square and watching the kids play on the new spinning structure on the playground. Other times, recess coaching consists of dance parties with the students to a Soulja Boy song. For teachers and administrators, the coaches are a welcome help.
In addition to the recess volunteers, Notre Dame students provide daily tutoring for students struggling with reading, a program called TutorND. The sessions consist of a lot of relationship building, including “would you rather” questions and games of Snowman and four-in-a-row, but the tutors also utilize evidence-based phonics with the goal of increasing IREAD pass rates.
To Marosz, tutoring is a great way to promote equity for the students at Coquillard.
“Tutoring really helps close the wealth gap for reading,” he said. “The issue isn’t that only poor kids struggle with reading. Rich kids need more help too, but they just get it because their parents can pay for it.”
Coquillard also has other tutoring programs besides TutorND, including ND West and Learning with Leaders. In these programs, they target not only the students who are the lowest readers in the class, but also the students that are top of their class at Coquillard and, with a push, could be able to pass the ILEARN. Hill recognizes the importance of making sure that the smartest kids can still learn to the fullest of their abilities without getting held back by their classmates who have more academic struggles.
“We’ve got kids that are coming in behind, and we’ve got kids who are working well below grade level, but they are being taught at a second-grade level,” Hill said. “We want to make sure they’re able to get the instruction they need to get to where they need to be.”
Hill, Rodriguez, and Marosz are pioneering other programs at the school, like the Positive Behavior Intervention and Support system, meant to reward the kids at the school for their good behavior. One reward is going on trips: Last year, they went to see A Minecraft Movie, went to the beach, and went ice skating. The year before they saw a play in the theater, an experience that Marosz thought was eye-opening for the students.
“I’m passionate about getting out of this building and going places because I think that a huge problem in disparate communities in general is that if you’re struggling to put food on the table, you’re not going places,” Marosz said.
These critical programs are happening because of the hard work of Coquillard staff and engaged community members. Unfortunately, all this hard work might not be enough to fix the school.
“If it was just about caring teachers and supportive adults, you’d see the school get better,” Christensen said. “Everyone who works at the school is faced with big challenges that they have to overcome everyday.”
Unfortunately, there might not be enough time for the school to get better.
In December of 2024, Coquillard barely survived efforts by the school board to close the school and turn it into a Career and Technology (CTE) Hub. The Coquillard students would have moved to Dickinson Middle School, making it a K-8 school (9). Members of the Coquillard community were concerned by the proposal.
“At the meeting, when they were announcing the plan, they did this whole slideshow and showed all the different ways that people would be affected by this change if they did it,” Hill said. “Students were not on that list.”
The school board didn’t have construction planned to turn the middle- and high school-sized bathrooms and classrooms at Dickinson into facilities accessible to kindergarteners. Furthermore, the Coquillard students are a unique group of kids who have unique needs.
“Are they going to get treated well if they get bussed over there?” Hill asked. “If I knew for sure that the district was going to put the money in and make it great for them, I think it could be great. I feel like South Bend schools haven’t quite gotten the idea of equity versus equality. Our needs are just different.”
According to Marosz, the school board thought they would be able to close Coquillard with very little pushback.
“The whole meeting was really negative and everyone was just dumping on us,” Marosz said. “If they would have made it a team effort and given reasons for closing us, then it probably would have worked. And yeah, I have a feeling they’ll try to propose it again.”
The district doesn’t like spending money on schools with low enrollment, and Coquillard is operating far below full enrollment. Still, it has been proven that smaller class sizes are better for struggling students. The minimum allowable class size at Coquillard is 26 students. Earlier in the year, they had to close one of the three first grade classrooms because it was operating below capacity. Now, the other two first grade classes are extremely full. This combined with low test scores keeps Coquillard on the chopping block each year.
“Do I think we can make Coquillard better? I do,” Hill said. “I think if we were given the right opportunities and are open to doing things differently, there’s a lot of positive change that can happen.”
Every day at Coquillard brings its fair share of ups and downs.
In Mr. Jamerson’s restorative justice classroom this morning, the Notre Dame tutors are at work. One Coquillard student is upset because he didn’t get his school breakfast, so he uses his tutoring time to venture into the basement cafeteria to ask a nice lunch lady for a meal of Trix yogurt, a cheese stick, a bag of goldfish, and an orange. Another student finally masters the magic -e sound and practices the difference between words like “cap” and “cape.”
Another student asks her tutor why her stepdad always yells at her mom and wonders if she can call the police next time he does that. Still another student practices writing his letters correctly and works on spelling his sight words. A fifth student is noticeably missing from school after facing disciplinary action for trying to break into the school to get food over the weekend.
In Mr. Marosz’s classroom, a crying young boy stumbles in, wearing no shoes because he decided to throw them in the trash during his tantrum. His face is red with anger, and tears dry on his face as reminders of his prior meltdown. Marosz meets him face to face and asks him the simple question: “What’s wrong?”
The same question could be asked about Coquillard itself. Everyone has a different answer. Marosz says racial integration is the answer, but he doesn’t know how that is going to happen given the popularity of school choice in South Bend. Rodriguez wishes they could hire more staff to help with reading and behavioral intervention. Hill imagines implementing a personalized learning program where students have a unique learning plan based on their skills instead of their grade level.
When asked how to fix the school, Dr. Christensen laughed.
“If I knew the solution to this problem, I would be fixing it all over the country,” she said.
Kate Rafford is an American studies and economics major with a minor in the Hesburgh Program of Public Service. Her essay was originally written for Professor Matthew Payne’s and Professor Nicholas Mainieri’s American studies course “South Bend Stories.”
References
- Indiana Department of Education. Data Center & Reports. 2025.
https://www.in.gov/doe/it/data-center-and-reports/. - Indiana Graduates: Prepared to Succeed. Coquillard Elementary School. 2025.
https://indianagps.doe.in.gov/Summary/School/767. - Scharf, Nadia. “New Indiana Laws Take Effect July 1.” Indianapolis Star, June 30, 2024. Accessed via NewsBank archive. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.proxy.library.nd.edu/apps/news/document-view?p=WOR
LDNEWS&t=pubname%3ASBTS%21South%2BBend%2BTribune%2B%2528IN%252
9&sort=YMD_date%3AD&hide_duplicates=2&fld-base-0=alltext&maxresults=60&val-
base-0=%22IREAD%22&docref
=news/19A04A97C4BF7C10 . - Beck, Caroline. “New Indiana IREAD Law Sparks Parent Concern As Student Retention Set to Rise.” Indianapolis Star, July 28, 2025. https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2025/07/28/new-indiana-3rd-grade-iread-
law-raises-parent-concerns-over-retention/84264183007/. - “1941: Thomas L. Hickey Inc. Built Defense Housing at Beacon Heights and Southmore Heights in South Bend, Indiana.” Tom and Kate Hickey Family History. September 26, 2014. https://tomandkatehickeyfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2014/09/1941-thomas-l-hickey-built-defense.html.
- “Henry Davis Jr. Calls for Investigation into South Bend Housing Issue.” WNDU, 21 February 2023. https://www.wndu.com/2023/02/21/henry-davis-jr-calls-investigation-into-south-bend-housing-issues/.
- Keirleber, Mark. “Buttigieg was ‘Under the Illusion’ that South Bend Schools are Integrated. But Despite a Decades-Long Struggle (and Federal Court Order), Stark Racial Divisions Persist.” The 74, January 22, 2020. https://www.the74million.org/article/buttigieg-was-under-the-illusion-that-south-bends-scHools-are-integrated-but-despite-a-decades-long-struggle-and-federal-court-order-stark-racial-divisions-persist/.
- Deaton, Rayleigh. “School Board, NAACP Update Desegregation Consent Decree.” South Bend Tribune, accessed via NewsBank, April 28, 2025. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.proxy.library.nd.edu/apps/news/document-view?p=WORLDNEWS&t=favorite%3A143E632A%21South%20Bend%20Tribune%20Collection%20&sort=YMD_date%3AD&hide_duplicates=2&fld-base-0=alltext&maxresults=60&val-base-0=%22oletha%20jones%22&docref=news/1A03D2D6BB8ACC40.
- Casal, Natasha. “South Bend School Board Votes to Keep Coquillard Elementary School Open.” WNDU, December 16, 2024. https://www.wndu.com/2024/12/17/south-bend-school-board-votes-keep-coquillard-elementary-school-open/.
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