A combined team from Palm Harbor University High School and Dunedin High School won first place in the Guys Read Book Battle, a high school reading competition that grew out of a Pinellas County program aimed at closing the boys' achievement gap. On Monday, Aug. 3, teachers gathered for that program's fourth summer symposium, eight days before school starts.
The Boys Study Summer Symposium, co-hosted by Pinellas County Schools and the Pinellas Education Foundation, is part of the district's Closing the Gap initiative, launched in 2013 to train teachers in strategies that shrink gender-based proficiency gaps in math, science and English. The program now works with teachers in 22 schools and reaches more than 4,500 students across the district.
At the symposium, fifth-grade teacher and football coach Charles Raby presented results from a single-gender classroom experiment he and his wife, Lauren Raby, conducted at Marjorie K. Rawlings Elementary in Pinellas Park. Charles Raby taught an all-boys class for a full school year. His students' English language arts proficiency jumped from 40 percent to 80 percent, and math proficiency rose from 27 percent to 73 percent, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
His methods: morning meetings where students hashed out conflicts, and lessons connecting math and reading to interests like sports and cars.
"We built this relationship as a class where nobody would act out," Raby said at the symposium. "We got a lot of teaching done."
Raby, who grew up in economic hardship and spent time in in-school suspension before football coaches pushed him academically, said he sees himself in his students at the largely low-income school.
Other strategies shared at the symposium included incorporating competition into lessons, giving students movement breaks and explaining the real-world uses of subjects like geometry and physics.
Karen Diaz Ramirez, an ESL teacher at Frontier Elementary in Clearwater and mother of two teenage boys, was among those taking notes. Ramirez has completed the district's gender-differentiated education course three times, calling it "an eye-opening experience" that changed how she understands her own sons' behavior at home.
The initiative has narrowed the district's gender gap in English language arts standardized testing from 11 percent in the 2017-18 school year to 5 percent by 2022-23, according to Pinellas Education Foundation CEO Kim Jowell, who described the program's results in an April 2024 profile. A micro-credentialing program in gender-differentiated instruction, launched in 2022 as the first of its kind in Florida, has been completed by 49 teachers as of the foundation's most recent report. More than 100 educators participate in Closing the Gap training annually.
Pinellas County Schools' first day of school is Tuesday, Aug. 11.
