Now in its eighth year of operation, The University of Texas Elementary School is firmly established as a research-based demonstration school in the heart of East Austin. The school holds a track record of success in serving urban children. Founded in 2003 as part of The UT System’s Every Child, Every Advantage initiative to support P-16 education, UT Elementary is operated by UT Austin as an open-enrollment campus, free to students, with a lottery-based admission system. The school enrolls children in grade levels pre-kindergarten through fifth. Our pre-kindergarten class has 20 students and all other grades kindergarten-through-fifth have two classes of 20.

UT Elementary offers a full, TEKS-aligned curriculum, employs scientifically-based research and best teaching practices, and draws upon a variety of resources available at the university. Besides providing an educational alternative for East Austin children, UT Elementary also represents an effort to apply new knowledge produced in the academic setting directly to classrooms in urban schools, and it serves as a training and development site for future teachers, social workers, psychologists, speech therapists, and nurses currently enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin.

Development

I was contracted to bring their site into the Oracle Content Management System and a new design in the Fall of 2009. The site featured a wide variety of content tailored for the students parents with a number of scripted elements powered by Oracle’s custom iDocScript language. I continued minor server administration functions until The University of Texas retired the Oracle Content Management System.