Photography by Brad Reed; Styling By Shauna Thibault Photographed on location at Kenilworth Elementary School

Depressed by statistics that say Arizona’s education system is flunking on every level? Take a closer look and you’ll find plenty of reasons to give Valley schools a big, fat gold star. Here are 10 things ­– from super students to award-winning programs – that deserve an A+ for effort.  (Hint: You are one of them.).

1. TEACHERS
Sure, your kids’ latest scores may have catapulted them to student-of-the-month status. But can they build an underwater robot? Can they think deeply on their feet?

With this measure of student success, Allan Cameron and Faridodin “Fredi” Lajvardi turned traditional teaching methods on their head far beyond the walls of their home campus, Carl Hayden Community High School in west Phoenix. Their focus on student-to-student collaboration and situations where the teacher takes a back seat has fostered a robotics club that defeated Massachusetts Institute of Technology teams three years in a row – all on a shoestring budget.

Students stay after school – sometimes until 7 or 8 p.m. – to build a working robot for the club. The work includes several trips to Home Depot, a fair amount of public relations and phone calls to local engineering companies, which offer advice (and the occasional robot claw) to help students overcome design issues. One of the students from the previous winning teams graduated from Arizona State University in May and was lauded by President Barack Obama in his commencement speech there.

Lajvardi and Cameron, who is now retired but still participates in the robotics club, say teachers generally teach “what they know” from 8 to 3. The robotics club – where they advise students on open-ended problems to which the teachers themselves may not know the answer – is different.

“The whole point,” they say, almost in unison, “is to get kids to think.”

It’s the same approach that won 2009 Teacher of the Year honors for Sarah Baird, who teaches kindergarten through fifth grade at Kyrene School District No. 28.

Baird, who grew up in Tucson and earned her teaching degree from Northern Arizona University, got her teaching start 10 years ago at Kyrene de los Cerritos Elementary School. Six years later, she moved down the road to Kyrene del Milenio and Kyrene de las Lomas, where there was a larger population of underprivileged students. “It’s amazing to me that you can travel a few miles down the road and there’s such a struggle,” Baird says.

But her focus – the idea of making math fun yet applicable to real-life problems – remained the same. Baird joined a Science Foundation Arizona advisory board to encourage applying more science, technology, engineering and math concepts to grade-school students to help them compete one day for 21st-century jobs with their world peers.

Much like Lajvardi and Cameron, Baird sees the bigger picture. She is now working on a three-year, $3 million state grant to support more training in math and science for teachers. The money, if it survives the state’s budget crisis, would fund an 18-day retreat at the Biosphere 2 near Tucson, where 35 teachers from around the state would work with Arizona’s leading scientists to tighten up their curriculum and tie the lessons to real-world problems. The first retreat began
July 8.

Photo by Sam Nalven Faridodin “Fredi” Lajvardi (left) and Allan Cameron (right) led Carl Hayden Community High School’s robotics club to defeat Massachusetts Institute of Technology teams three years in a row.

2. STUDENTS
If children are our future, we can all retire early – students these days aren’t just aspiring to the change the world, they already have.

Take Michael Silverman, an 18-year-old recent graduate of Phoenix Country Day School in Paradise Valley. The self-proclaimed “student of sustainability” (so say his business cards) helped found the school’s Green Team and was honored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the President’s Environmental Youth Awards for “outstanding achievement in environmental stewardship.”

The Afro-sporting, Stanford-bound teen helped secure grants from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to purchase recycling bins for the campus and from Salt River Project to help install solar panels that now power the school’s electric carts.

PCDS is brimming with over-achievers: Junior Michael Young staged his fourth Swing Fore Kids Golf Classic this year to benefit Phoenix Children’s Hospital’s animal-assisted therapy program (last year’s tournament raised $65,000); and Erica Dohring recently returned from Nepal in her attempt to become the youngest American woman to climb Mount Everest (bad weather thwarted her plans, but we’re still in awe of her effort).

These super students aren’t alone in their premature success, however; they’re in good company with legions of other community-minded, motivated teens who defy Arizona’s reputation for lackluster education and make old-school extra-curricular activities look extra lame: South Mountain High School graduating senior Raynetta Brown was one of the first five recipients of the ASU Barack Obama Scholars program in May (she accepted her award from the president himself); Corona del Sol High School senior Smitha Ramakrishna competed in the national Intel Science Talent Search in Washington, D.C., this spring as Arizona’s only representative; and Central High School senior Diana Carmen received a $10,000 scholarship for logging more than 350 community service hours this year with the Native American Community Health Center (what have you done lately?).

These stellar examples are in addition to the 16 recipients of the Phoenix Youth and Education Commission’s 2009 Outstanding Young Man/Young Woman of the Year awards. Winners this year included Lindsay Garner, a senior at Cactus Shadows High School who helped organize blood drives, highway cleanups and UNICEF events on campus; Scott Ferreira, a senior at Brophy College Preparatory who co-founded Open Table, a nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating poverty; Candice Giffin, a junior at Horizon High School who founded her school’s Ecology Club; Joseph Replogle, a senior at Thunderbird High School who helped build homes for impoverished families in Mexico; Tanairi Ochoa, a senior at Alhambra High School who registered eligible students to vote; and Kiefer Forseth, a junior at Brophy College Preparatory who traveled around the world with the award-winning Phoenix Boys Choir.

Inspired yet?

3. PARENTS
National PTA membership has dropped from 12 million in the 1960s to about 5.5 million in 2009, but that’s no reason to assume parents are paying more attention to their Blackberrys than their kids. Today’s volunteer-minded moms and dads are getting involved in myriad creative ways, from school environmental initiatives to taking classes with their children to lobbying legislators for education funding.

Parent Legislative Action Network
Racked by the economic crisis, the Gilbert Public School District is trimming an estimated $27 million from its budget, according to the district’s Website. As part of the cutbacks, 400 teachers’ contracts will not be renewed for the fall. Gilbert moms Brenda Morreim, Adelaida Severson and Barb Dwyer decided they weren’t going to take it any more. They formed the Parent Legislative Action Network, a grassroots organization whose goal is to mobilize parents statewide to write to and meet with state legislators, encouraging them to make education spending a top priority and to reinstate the County Equalization Tax – a property tax that generated about $215 million for public education before it was suspended
in 2006.

ParentLink Program, Catalina Ventura
Parents at this Alhambra district elementary school understand what their kids are going through, because they’re going to school together. The ParentLink program offers adult courses such as “Helping Your Child Succeed at Spalding Phonics” or “Basic English for Monolingual Parents” as well as parent/child classes in CPR and dance. The two-time Golden Bell Award-winning program also features a parent resource room with more than 700 education- and parenting-related materials for checkout.

Elaina West, PTA Volunteer of the Year
To be named PTA Volunteer of the Year these days takes a lot more than a stellar banana bread recipe, and Elaina West certainly sets the bar high. She’s vice president of the PTSA at Hidden Hills Elementary School in Paradise Valley, where she not only launched the recycling committee but turned it into a profitable and charitable enterprise. She brought in the recycling bins herself and partnered with an organization that earns the school thousands of dollars for recycling items like ink cartridges and cell phones. Through a program with LensCrafters, she collects used glasses, which get repaired and sent to needy people throughout the world.

She chairs the school’s annual food drive, the fundraising committee (for which she spearheaded a money-earning and literacy-boosting Readathon) and Banking Days, a Washington Mutual-based program that teaches kids to save and manage money. Elaina also helps with Hidden Hills’ health-screening days, book fairs, community nights, picture days and a basketball clinic (taught by her husband, retired Phoenix Suns center Mark West). Did we mention that her sons don’t even go to that school anymore? Her younger son has moved on to Shea Middle School, where she’s the president of the PTA.

She also volunteers with NBA wives organizations, and for the past 19 years, she and her husband have run the South Mountain Education and Basketball Camp, a free five-day summer program for underprivileged kids.

“I like seeing people being able to better themselves,” Elaina says. “I’m a giving person. It’s just my personality.”