Sean C. Morgan
Lagging behind the statewide averages in assessment testing, Supt. Tom Yahraes is broadly recommending four actions while members of the Sweet Home School Board are pondering whether the district should return to a five-day school week.
The Oregon Department of Education released test data for the 2015-16 Smarter Balanced testing last month. The data show that 62.2 percent of Sweet Home students in the third through fifth grades were below grade level proficiency in language arts – 37.8 percent med or exceeded the standard. By comparison, in the third through fifth grades, 52.4 percent of students met or exceeded the state standards.
In grades six through eight, 51 percent were below grade level proficiency, and 43.3 percent of high school juniors were below grade level proficiency.
In math, 69.1 percent of third- through fifth-grade students fell below grade level proficiency; 60.9 percent of students in grades six through eight were falling short; and 74.3 percent of juniors were missing the mark. That means just 30.9 percent of third, fourth and fifth graders met or exceeded the standard. Across the state, 44.9 percent met or exceeded the standard.
Yahraes said he looked at how seven fourth-grade classrooms fared on the math test. The best performance among those was a class in which 67 percent of the students met or exceeded the standard. The class that performed the poorest had just 8 percent meet or exceed the standard.
Yahraes reported the information to the School Board during its regular meeting Monday evening, Oct. 10.
The trend since 2010 shows students performing more poorly annually statewide and in the Sweet Home School District. Sweet Home roughly compared to the state’s performance, but since 2014 when Sweet Home began using the Smarter Balanced assessment test, Sweet Home’s performance has been slipping even lower than the state’s.
Science testing in the fifth, eighth and 11th grades shows students meeting the standards around as much as students statewide. The state and district have continued to use the OAKS.
“It’s our core instruction we need to work on,” Yahraes told the board. The question is whether curriculum is aligned throughout the district, whether the district has silos of different curriculum. How instructional time is used, whether it is effective, is important as well.
The curriculum must be aligned to the standards, Yahraes said. The district must ensure the effective use of instructional time and connect assessments to the core curriculum.
It’s customary for a superintendent to set goals and then be held accountable to them, Yahraes said. Improving student performance on assessments is one of his goals.
He outlined four recommendations, and he’s already started implementing them. Each of them is something he has taken from places where he has been, things he learned to improve schools from various leaders and superintendents.
The first is to implement academic leadership teams, to locate pockets of success –like the top fourth-grade classroom, and replicate them, he said. He has gathered highly effective teachers from those pockets of success, two from each elementary school, three from the Junior High and four from the High School, to develop focused lesson plans to push out on professional development Fridays, used for teacher in-service and training. The group advises Yahraes and the principals to improve core instruction.
“This team, we hope, will propel us forward,” Yahraes said.
He is implementing school performance plans at each school, targeting curriculum alignment, instructional effectiveness and connecting the assessment to the core, Yahraes said. The plans include metrics to evaluate performance.
Third, Yahraes recommends pushing resources to the highest areas of need, which are the third through the fifth grades, in which the largest numbers of students fall below the standards.
If the district doesn’t help these students, they’ll be behind later on in school, he said.
Fourth, he wants to identify other indicators of student success to ensure the district is pursuing excellence in every area, whether it’s increased participation, activities or citizenship, for example.
“Let’s maximize our strengths,” Yahraes said.
The district has a number of strengths, he said. Among them is an instructional staff that cares deeply for kids. The community demonstrates extraordinary volunteerism and service toward schools and the community. Support staff have a “can do” spirit. The Central Office wisely manages resources. The board and administration lead with passion and know the students are the most precious resource.
“We have all the right ingredients to restore greatness to our core academics,” Yahraes said.
Resident Vernon Tunnell Sr. addressed the board during public comments prior to this discussion. He demanded the board do something with the district’s falling academic performance and return to the five-day week.
Chairman Mike Reynolds said it was interesting that Tunnell chose that night to talk to the board about it.
The board implemented the four-day school week in 2012, primarily as a money-saving technique, Reynolds said. He asked Business Manager Kevin Strong to bring back numbers showing the cost of returning to a five-day week and Yahraes to tell the board what instruction would be like in a five-day week.
“The lights stayed on,” Reynolds said. “Other things didn’t happen,” and he wasn’t sure the district saved the money the board thought it would.
“It seems to me we need to review the school week,” he said.
“I know we are meeting instructional minutes,” Yahraes said, referring to the amoung of time students are required by the state to be receiving instruction. “With those instructional minutes, we need to drill down to what we’re doing.”
The trends in test results showed some decline in academic performance following the adoption of the four-day week. But the state declined as a whole during that time as well.
In elementary school reading, the district had better performance than the state, but it fell below the statewide average by 3 points in 2012 although it performed better than the state in 2013. Starting in 2014, the district was more than 11 points below the state average each year. With the exception of the sixth through eighth grades and 2013, the trend was similar in math across the district.
Yahraes said he was part of a four-day task force before. It found that districts can be more successful when the community has resources available to students on the fifth day of the week.
“My concern in Sweet Home is our homeless rate is at 10 percent across the district,” Yahraes said. “Our homeless rate out at Foster is at 24 percent.”
Nearly two-thirds of the student population are counted as economically disadvantaged, qualifying for free and reduced lunches, he said, and Sweet Home has the highest percentage in the state of special needs students, 19.7 percent.
On that fifth day, some of those students aren’t even going to a home, he said. “It’s hard on kids, and I care about that.”
In his experience, generally, teachers dislike when students have longer breaks in terms of instruction, Yahraes said, particularly “the lost time and habits at home that aren’t conducive to learning.”
School Board member Jason Redick was skeptical about whether the four-day week caused academic declines.
“I think focusing on the four-day school week is focusing on the elephant in the room when the real problem is the mouse in the corner,” Redick said. The school with the highest homeless rate, Foster, has been performing better than the other three elementary schools.
One fourth-grade class had 67 percent meet the standard, while another had just 8 percent, Redick said, and he asked what the difference was.
When his car breaks down, he said, “I don’t replace my whole engine.”
He finds out what’s wrong and fixes that, he said. “I don’t want to get side-tracked by the obvious thing because years down the road, we’ll be asking what went wrong.”
Other districts have four-day weeks but are doing better academically, he said. Central Linn is doing better. He wanted to know what Central Linn is doing differently.
Yahraes said that one difference between the two is 49 percent of Central Linn’s students are economically disadvantaged compared to 65 percent of Sweet Home’s.
So far, most information about the four-day week has been anecdotal, he said. “I think we have a lot more evidence of other problems.”
Too much is at stake to focus on the wrong problem, Redick said, noting that he is not necessarily against returning to the five-day school week.
“We have data,” said Chanz Keeney, a member of the board. “And we have a superintendent, and I am ready to move forward on this. It is a long process if we move back to a five day.”
Keeney said he believed the data shows what happened when the district went to a four-day week, and the board can’t wait until the end of the year to begin looking at it.
Reynolds and Jenny Daniels, board member, agreed. Jason Van Eck, a member of the board, said he agreed with both viewpoints, but the board has to do something with it.
Reynolds asked Yahraes to spend some time on it and return to the board with more information and suggestions next month.
Present at the meeting were Van Eck, Angela Clegg, Daniels, Keeney, Redick, Reynolds, Carol Babcock and Debra Brown. Nick Augsburger was absent.