Sean C. Morgan
In its quest to turn around plummeting test scores and student achievement in the past couple of years, in addition to the districtwide effort with its Academic Leadership Team, the Sweet Home School District is looking at the building level for specific improvements with the creation of school performance plans.
In October, Sweet Home Schools Supt. Tom Yahraes told the School Board just how poorly Sweet Home students were performing collectively on state assessments over the past five years as Sweet Home’s performance fell significantly in relation to statewide averages.
He outlined a plan to do something about it.
Improving student achievement is one of three key priorities for Yahraes, he said. His plan is to lift and support core instruction by aligning curriculum to the standards, ensuring effective use of instructional time and student engagement strategies and aligning and connecting assessments to the core.
His remaining priorities also include developing thriving citizens, and cultivating a culture of organizational wellness and effectiveness.
Yahraes has identified and is implementing four specific steps to improvement the district’s performance in each of these areas.
They include implementing a district academic leadership team, school performance plans, pushing resources where they need to go to support high-need areas and identifying other student success indicators.
“A school performance plan is a simple document which lays out very simply our three priority areas,” Yahraes said. His intent is to “provide simple priority areas where we can all focus, whether we’re instructional leaders or instructional staff.”
The performance plans are forms that outline specific goals and ways to measure success in those areas. To achieve those goals, the schools implement strategies and curriculum alignment that comes from the district’s Academic Leadership Team (reported in the Dec. 28 issue of The New Era).
Yahraes asks questions pertaining to each of his priority areas. In academic achievement, for example, he asks whether teachers have a clear understanding of their content standards, whether learning targets match the intended instructional outcome, how that’s communicated to students and whether students can articulate what they’re learning.
Measurements include participation, student proficiency, academic achievement, academic growth and growth among sub-groups of students.
These are what Yahraes calls “tight” indicators of success, but he’s also looking for “loose” indicators as well – other things that show student success that aren’t necessarily tied to hard test scores.
This system is already in place, Yahraes said. To get things going, he has asked administrators to identify three indicators that students are thriving citizens.
Holley Elementary School has had good attendance rates, 94 percent last year, Yahraes said, for example. And he wants to know what Holley did to pull students into school. Those strategies can be used elsewhere in the district.
The district wants all of its schools to hit 95 percent, Yahraes said. The document outlines the principals’ answers. The plan also includes building level forms with individual goals addressed by individual members of the staff.
“We know there is a correlation between sports, activities and academics,” Yahraes said. “You awaken possible hidden talents, passion and dreams in kids.”
The performance plan may look at how many extra programs are available outside of the school day and outline ways to improve the number of students taking advantage of them, perhaps using staff to talk about the available opportunities. It will set a target level and list plans to reach that target.
When a school reaches a goal, Yahraes said, the school, the people in the school, are rewarded in some way.
The key is measurement, Yahraes said. “What you measure, you end up paying more attention to. Then it becomes part of the culture,” from custodians to instructional leaders.
“What we’re beginning to build is a strategic plan for Sweet Home over time,” Yahraes said, as each plan is incorporated into the district’s overall goals.
It’s a K-12 approach and goal, said High School Principal Ralph Brown. It puts every grade level on the same page.
This process looks at district goals and puts them at the forefront at the building level, Brown said.
When the superintendent talks about “thriving citizens,” Brown said, this helos explain what it looks like in different buildings.
Staff members at each school are speaking the same language, he said.
“It feels really good this year that we’re moving forward,” Brown said. “I’m really excited about it.”
In keeping with a football metaphor Yahraes introduced when he discussed test scores with the School Board in October, these are the game plans a team uses going forward. They’re backward-designed as the district and Academic Leadership Team crunch data from past years.
The district’s instructional leaders are the coaches, and their job is to figure out what the correct actions are to improve performance, Yahraes said. They have to identify the great teachers who can share their instructional practices, curriculum selection, their expectations for assignments and their feedback to students.
“We’re going to our own home-grown experts that have proven they’re highly effective,” Yahraes said. “If we aren’t hitting our marks, where we want to be, we can supply assistance and help.”
The district staff can meet, analyze the problem and diagnose the problem, Yahraes said. Then the district can move support and resources there to solve the problem.
Next week, The New Era will publish a story about how the district plans to push those resources where needed.