About Our School
Steele is a neighborhood and community school that is dedicated to student success and continually monitors academic progress. The staff works collaboratively to solve challenges and ensure that children are thriving.
Steele embraces engaging, collaborative learning. Steele also puts a special emphasis on writing with a dedicated, sequential program that helps children learn to communicate through the written word.
We offer after-school programs throughout the year including Cross Country. Our garden and mosaics offer beauty throughout the school environment.
Inspired by exciting, ongoing research into connections between brain development and music, Tucson's Opening Minds through the Arts (OMA program) is a leader in a national movement to integrate arts education with core curriculum.
OMA uses instrumental music, opera, dance, theater and visual arts to help teach reading, writing, math and science to children in kindergarten through 8th grade. Each fully implemented OMA school has an Arts Integration Specialist and a team of seven artists who work alongside classroom teachers, adapting each lesson to support teaching of core content and knowledge. In addition, children learn to play the recorder, violin, a wind instrument and keyboard. In Tucson, the OMA program employs 26 artists from the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, Arizona Opera Company, University of Arizona Schools of Music and Dance and other arts organizations to teach 30-minute, twice-weekly classes for 36 weeks of the school year that support core curriculum goals.
OMA brings the arts to Tucson Unified School District classrooms as a means of ...
- Teaching core curriculum
- Improving test scores
- Fostering cognitive development
- Igniting love and understanding of the arts
- Narrowing the gap between less-privileged and more-privileged students
- Building community
- Encouraging self-expression
- Supporting the arts
At Tucson Unified, we recognize that gifted students have special educational needs that should be met within the context of educating the whole child through a variety of services and options. The role of the Gifted Education program is to:
- Identify the particular abilities and needs of these students.
- Challenge students functioning at the highest level of ability.
- Encourage underachieving students who are capable of the highest performance.
- Promote higher level creative and productive thinking skills throughout the district.
- Promote creative or productive achievement.
The District is committed to providing all students enrolled at the District with equal access to the District’s Gifted and Talented Education program.
Harold Steele was elected superintendent for the Tucson Unified School District after S. C. Newsom resigned in 1916. Harold Steele remained the superintendent until the spring of 1918. On the TUSD history site Harold Steele is listed as the 17th superintendent, with some of the earlier office holders being brief interim superintendents.Before becoming the superintendent, Harold Steele was the principal of Tucson High School, which is the oldest operating public high school in Arizona - first established in 1892 and then re-established in 1906. In 1906 Tucson High School was briefly housed in a two-room building at 1010 E. 10th Street (the site of the current district offices), and then the high school moved to what is now Roskruge Bilingual Magnet School. It was at that location that Harold Steele was the high school's third principal starting in 1909. Harold Steele was specially noted for using specialized teachers for subject classes rather than have a single teacher teach all subjects.
Harold Steele organized the first Boy Scout troop in Tucson on April 20, 1911, when he was in his first year as the principal of Tucson High School at what is now Roskruge Bilingual Middle School.
Steele Elementary School was built from 1960 bond funds. It was originally built as a 20-classroom building at a cost of $459,165. Harold Steele came to Tucson for the opening of the school in 1962, and he left $33,754 in his will for the school when he passed away in 1969.
Tucson High School 100th Anniversary in 2006
TUSD History
The Otis H. Chidester Scout Museum of Southern Arizona, Inc.
A 1912 photograph of Harold Steele with his wife, Lucile, is on the Scout Museum Site.