Written by: Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic
When director of teaching and learning Stafford Boyd laid out how the Newberg School District has changed its model for creating school improvement plans (SIP) at the Oct. 20 school board meeting, little did he know he already had a convert in the audience.
Boyd spent about 25 minutes laying out how SIPs are no longer just a spreadsheet of student achievement data put together by a small group of teachers and administrators, but rather a narrative of each school’s successes and challenges created collaboratively with parents to be a tool for continual improvement.
In essence, what was once more of a spreadsheet has become a story.
Boyd could hardly have received a better endorsement for the changes, as first-term board member Bob Woodruff put in his two cents at the end of the presentation.
“This is my third go around doing these and this is the first time it’s ever made sense to me,” Woodruff said. “The new format, I really appreciate that. It seems to have generated more and better conversations than the old one did. The old one felt like just plugging in numbers.”
Most noticeable among the changes to the model are the broader scope and narrative form, as school site councils can now include the school’s mission and vision for the future and highlight its accomplishments while still examining student achievement data to set goals moving forward.
Chehalem Valley Middle School principal Karen Pugsley, who also put together SIPs as the principal of Green School at Newberg High School, said the previous model involved specifically examining student achievement data from the OAKS state assessment and sorting it quite deeply.
“We got really good at it, but it didn’t tell the whole story,” Pugsley said. “With the new process, we have the ability to tell the story of what’s happening between the data.”
Although the scope has been broadened, the new model also requires schools to identify and focus on fewer improvement goals, specifically limiting them to four “leverage goals,” three of which are tied to student achievement.
The problem with the previous approach was that site councils were presented with so many small-scale goals across such a broad range that few were significantly or efficiently addressed, a result superintendent Kym LeBlanc-Esparza described as the “kitchen sink phenomena.”
“We’re going to carry the water in three things, in three goals, but we’re going to carry it just in those buckets and not in every single possible place we can carry water,” Pugsley said. “Because then what happens, who knows if you were effective or not based on just one thing and you’ve got 10 things you’re doing?”
Mirroring the format, the process for creating SIPs has become much broader and inclusive, with staff specifically reaching out to include parents and community members on site councils.
Not coincidentally, the fourth leverage goal for all schools in the district is to increase community and family engagement, and being more inclusive in the creation process has already paid dividends at Chehalem Valley.
Pugsley credited the new process for several instances of noteworthy parent engagement, including the establishment of the school’s portable clothes closet, which was put together in a flash when the school communicated the need.
Pugsley said parents are learning things they didn’t know about the school, like that 40 percent of CV students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and that is leading them to participate.
Parent Emily Chlumak is a good example of that phenomenon.
When Pugsley and assistant principal Casey Petrie started at CV last year, Chlumak said she was made to feel welcome as conferences were easier to attend and she also attended several principle coffee sessions.
That led her to get more involved and this year she is serving as PTO president and will serve on the CV site council.
“That was really inspiring and she left me a lot of opportunity to get involved in any way I felt pulled toward,” Chlumak said of Pugsley. “My pull is really to get more people involved because I think parent connection is a big deal in middle school and I wasn’t aware of that until recently.”
Boyd also made changes in the hopes of making SIPs feel less like a report to which they would be held accountable externally by the superintendent or the school board and more of a collaborative tool to encourage growth.
To that end, Boyd has created professional learning systems designed to align the actions of district officials, principals and teachers in a way that is always pointed toward improving student learning and performance.
To avoid the feeling of presenting to the boss, and to enhance the narrative structure, SIPs will not be presented at school board meetings, but given at each school, with district staff and available board members rotating around to each presentation
“I felt like the board was restricted by the environment to actually ask the questions that they needed to know,” Pugsley said of the old format. “They’re also not in the context of the story. We can actually show them as opposed to just talking about it. Here’s our tiny library or here’s our clothes closet.”
Presentations will begin this month and stretch through February, as some site councils are further along in their work than others.
Chehalem Valley instructional coach Bethany Stoller said she appreciates that Boyd has changed the meeting format for site councils from one hour a month to four half-day meetings throughout the year, which allows for more intensive work.
The hope is also that because they will be engaged with SIPs throughout the school year, teachers and administrators will build off the previous year’s SIP instead of putting it on the shelf once it’s finished and starting from scratch the next year.
Pugsley agrees and in all, has found the process to be more intellectually and emotionally challenging than in the past, but also more worthwhile.
“I could put together an old school improvement process in my sleep in about four hours, really literally,” Pugsley said. “I knew what levers to push, exactly how to do it. I would meet with our teacher leaders and we would do it. But that was our analysis. Now it’s taking us much longer and it’s more productive.”
