Stories from the Field
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On Being an Excellent School
The proficiency and achievement scores came in last spring sporadically with some needing adjustment before we could figure out what they meant. For some reason, each time we got a little more information from our district office, I felt compelled to figure it out. First, we saw that we were one of the few in the district who hit AYP on third grade Reading. That was a major celebration. Then the rest started trickling in and one by one, we had hit the state indicator for all the tests in both third and fourth grades. On the next to the last day of school, the last information we received was fourth-grade Writing. We had to do some figuring with the scores because they were meaningless as first reported. Two hours later, we had a passing score of over 90%—time for cartwheels in the hall!
Of course, we were a little nervous about celebrating until we got the official information this fall. The scores seemed even better then when we looked at our advanced and accelerated percentages. The top one was third-grade Reading with 59.9% scoring advanced or accelerated. The lowest one was fourth grade Citizenship with 33.7% advanced. Science was 41.6% advanced which was a real shocker since 2 years ago we had only 42% passing!
Of course, I immediately started considering what might have lead to this grand performance and decided that I needed help in pondering this, so I did a little exit survey especially with teachers at grades 3 and 4. The results came down to these:
- Three years ago in our CIP, we decided that we really needed to focus on knowing what it was that we needed for our students to learn, so we looked at first making sure that the teachers had the most current courses of study at their fingertips AND that they were teaching the indicators from those courses of study. Two years ago, we changed the focus to sharing those indicators with our students. This year we are working on ways to make sure our students know what they are expected to do as a result of learning those indicators. Next year, our plan is to put a lot more emphasis on involving the parents in this knowledge.
- We have a phenomenally active Intervention Assistance Team which we call our Care Team. Originally we met after school on alternating Tuesdays for an hour spending about 20 minutes on each student. For the past two years, we have stepped that up to adding an hour on Tuesday mornings when we have a Pre-Care Team involving just the classroom teacher, the parents, the school psychologist, the staff development teacher, and the principal. Typically we now see over 70 students per year in Care Team. The advantage is that we see them early or see new students with problems as soon as they get into the building rather than delaying that sometimes months. The other half of this, of course, is a terrific staff who is willing to take on whatever accommodations the students need.
- As a corollary to our Care Team, we have cross-categorical special education services. We have 3 resource room teachers and one tutor (in a building of 647 students). Essentially they work with a grade level range rather than with all CD students or all LD students. We are able to do a lot more with inclusion with this arrangement, and we try very hard to tailor the program to fit the child rather than the other way around.
- Grade level collaboration is probably the most powerful professional development that we support in our school. As much as possible, grade levels are scheduled for common planning time. Our district also gives us building funds that we can allocate toward improvement efforts, and every year, our staff decides the best way to spend most of that money is to hire subs for a maximum of 2 days (in half or whole days spread out across the year) per grade level, so that teachers can have a significant block of time to do long range planning. Our Site Steering Committee must approve their agenda for the day. The results from these days are truly astounding. Most of our grade level teams also meet throughout the summer and weekly during the school just to share information and support each other.
- Our last year’s third graders were first graders when we were in our first year of formal Literacy Collaborative implementation. Those are the students who scored 59.9% accelerated or advanced in Reading. We were without our LC Coach for one year due to financial and staffing considerations, but the program is back now, and we are hoping to be able to keep that level of performance.
- We also implemented a new math program last year (see South-Western City Schools Website for the name of the program). An observation by a special needs teacher leads us to suspect that this program not only helped our math scores, but also helped the students embrace a problem solving approach in all content areas. Please remember that this is certainly only a limited observation.
There are also many other programs that we have to support students—Early Reading Intervention, Intermediate Intervention, after school tutoring, Ohio Reads or Early Childhood Literacy—all grant supported. Certainly these all have an effect, but the daily teaching in the classroom is basis of everything.
By reading this information, I am sure that you have surmised that we have an outstanding staff. As part of 11 district schools that were either effective or excellent, we were recently asked to do a board presentation. The name of ours was “Student by Student/Indicator by Indicator.” That is how we believe we did it.
