Think about the conversations you have had around the two audits. Please add one comment that addresses following questions and identifies the area of focus for your school.
-How did the team arrive on the Focus Area for the school?
-What data point from the audits were considered in identifying the Focus Area?
-What is the base line data point that needs improving?
-What percentage of improvement is desired through the action plans in the CSIP?
-How can the whole school become involved in improving this data point?
No replies necessary. This information will be used as we plan for the summer conference.
Tags: Session 2
This year we initiated a school-wide Citizenship Campaign that has been aimed at promoting good manners and excellent behavior. The training helped us realize how important activities such as this are to promoting a sense of belonging for students. By recognizing students who are serving as models of good behavior for others, we have placed all of our students on an equal playing field in terms of qualifying for monthly awards. They cannot achieve the award without investing themselves in meeting the goals that have been set; however, there are no obstacles to prevent any child from accomplishing the goal. The training has increased our sense of commitment to the program and made us think about how we can enhance it for next year. It also offers an interesting starting point for conversation with our staff about creating a “sense of belonging” for all students.
We agree that cultivating character is an important part in the education of all students. To help teach good manners and respect for others, the guidance counselor started a program called Take 2. This program is a weekly manners skit that demonstrates good manners in a variety of settings. Each Tuesday, about 4-5 students are chosen to act out a skit during morning announcements. The skits are either “live” or have been taped. The topics are chosen by the school counselor or from ideas submitted by teachers, students, or safety committee recommendations. When the skit begins, the students first show the incorrect way to handle a situation. Then, the director claps the scene marker, and the students act out Take 2, the correct way to handle the situation. Some of the topics presented involve friendship issues, saving seats in the cafeteria, how to greet someone, manners, safety, study and test taking skills, playground rules, and lunch room expectations. The topics are endless. The “actors” are chosen randomly, although sometimes students who need an extra boost are asked to act or participate in the skit. These performances are well received by the children, especially the taped ones!
When looking at a focus area for our school, we would like concentrate on our newly redistricted families because we feel we already meet the needs of our diverse school population. Our principal has already sent a welcoming letter to each family describing our school, staff, and activities at Crestview. We held a “Cookies With Crestview” event on the lawn before our monthly PTA meeting. Highlights of this special event included meeting our school mascot “Big Red”, our principal and teachers, student guided tours were given, a slide show of Crestview events was shown, our school song was playing in the background, refreshments were served, and welcome gifts were distributed. Although attendance was poor due to inclement weather, students felt the Crestview spirit through the teachers and staff present and it was evident from parent response that our staff genuinely cares about our students. We have plans to share several ideas with staff at the first faculty meeting of the year in August on ways to include are newly redistricted students on the first day.
Our focus area for Baker is to look at inequalities between male and females with regards to academic achievement, SOL and HAT data, discipline issues, and overall conduct. While our school does not have an achievement gap between races or subgroups, we do find that our female students are recognized more for conduct in a positive way than our male students. This has been a topic of conversation throughout the school year in faculty meetings and grade level meetings. We are going to continue to examine this trend next school year too.
After reviewing the audit, it was evident that involving parents in activities is an area that needs to be improved upon. This weakness exists across all demographic areas. We have great parental support for mandatory meetings (discipline and/or special education services related meetings ). There are several limitations and reasons that parental involvement is not an area that we pride ourselves in. We will not focus on those reasons but focus on our plan of action. Next school year we will place significant focus on ‘activities’ for the families of our students. We will have informational workshops for parents, athletic games (staff vs. parents), and present county sponsored nights (i.e. back to school night) in a more enticing way. Currently, our PTA is inactive. We are in the beginning stages of forming an association for the 2010-11 school year.
We have noticed, as well, the great support we receive from all of our parents in regards to attendance at mandatory meetings. It appears parents from different minority groups are not volunteering as much as in the classroom as our white parents. This year, we hosted an ESL parent information night. We have also conducted home visits to increase communication with parents who have been difficult to contact through traditional means. We will continue to brainstorm ideas for involving parents from all groups.
We looked at the data from both audits and saw that our Hispanic and African American population is under represented in school activities, overall scores are lower, and discipline referrals are higher. We have decided to make our focus area around these students and making them feel more included in our community. The data that we feel needs to be improved is more positive communication with family, which will internally help the student and family feel more included and in return allow the student to focus more on test scores. We also hope that the positive communication and feeling of inclusiveness with bring down the discipline referrals, when parents are being contacted and receiving positive feedback from the school and not only negative feedback. The whole school can become involved in this by having more coalition clubs, or cultural clubs. Also, by encouraging teachers and administration to call home and make contact when the student does something well and positive. Finally, by personally inviting these parents and families to school events and not just allowing the word of mouth to get to them and assuming that they have read the announcements or emails sent home. Adding a personal touch will help them feel more included.
Looking towards the next school year, we are going to continue to refine our program to help integrate new students to our school. 4th graders in our zone center are oriented to our school and some of the issues surrounding coming to a new school. For parents, a coffee with our school counselor, is designed to make them aware of resources within and outside of the school and will help make a smooth transition to 3 Chopt. These types of orientation sessions would also include parents from our rezoned area and our ESL population. New student groups, new student orientation, and new lunch bunch for students are already part of our program, expanding this to include parents more is our goal.
After looking at our data we will be focusing on discipline and bullying within our school. We have worked hard this year to implement a Character Counts program and pep assemblies to highlight students strengths, not just the academics. While we have seen some improvements we hope to see more especially with our exceptional education students. Teachers/Administrators have worked diligently to be proactive and notify parents if a situation starts. Our school also contacted various middles schools and speakers to highlight and educate our students and families on bullying. We are hoping to be trained in the OLWEUS program and see the positive changes it will bring to our school.
Rivers Edge was trained in the Olweus Bullying Prevention program this year and will fully implement it with a kick-off assembly in September. The benefits we have already seen with the simple introduction of their four common rules and classroom meetings have been impressive. We’re excited about the full force campaign next.
Over the years at Tuckahoe we have emphasized our school’s motto and partner with Chick-fil-a to highlight good character. However, in reflection, we believe it is time to implement a more formal bullying program. We are investigating the OLWEUS program and other formal Character Ed. programs for next school year.
Many of parent volunteers come from households which are financially sustained by the income of one parent. This allows the other parent to volunteer during school hours. Many of our parents from minority groups are a part of a two income household and, therefore, do not always have the opportunity to volunteer during the school day. This year, we hosted an ESL parent information night, two middle school transition parent meetings at night, a Fall festival on Saturday, an evening school wide picnic and all PTA meetings are held in the evening. Hard copies of the PTA newsletter are sent to any parent who does not have an e-mail account. We will continue to brainstorm ways to involve all parents.
Focus Area: Arrived upon through our equity audit.
Focus Area: Increase parent participation through community events, PTA membership, and volunteerism.
Data points: Quia survey reveals parent participation only occurs when students are showcased, we would rather have a partnership.
Baseline data point: 2009 – 2010 PTA Membership, volunteerism hours, attendance at school/community events.
Percentage of Improvement: 25% for PTA Membership improvement is desired.
How can school become involved: By participating and supporting community events
It seems like we are working on much of the same goals to increase parent involvement at our schools. We are sister schools and not only look forward to the opportunity to work together to foster positive student academic achievement, but also to work together on positive ways to foster parent involvement at our schools.
We have this same area of concern! Last night we met with new “potential” PTA Board members and while parents are willing to help out, they don’t really want the post of officer, especially president! We spent a lot of time talking about the splitting and sharing of responsibilities, but feel that until the parents know that we MEAN what we SAY, they’re hesitant to trust.
Focus Area: We felt that the parent equity audit was the most relevant for our demographics. We would like to maintain our consistent parent participation in all school activities including PTA, classroom involvement, fundraisers, volunteerism.
Data Points: We looked at monthly data showing number of parents volunteering within a month. Also, data was collected through discussions with our PTA president and faculty as to ways parents were involved within our school (2009-2010 PTA Membership, volunteerism hours).
Percentage of Improvement: Our goal is to have 100% PTA Membership for the 2010-2011 school year.
Entire School Involvement: Continue to encourage positive parent/teacher relationships, involvement in classrooms, partnerships for fund raisers (ie. Bruster’s night, 5th grade car wash, Spring Carnival, etc.).
Our biggest challenge is not a new one to our school or this county – we have a predominantly Caucasian faculty/staff working with a predominantly African American student population. It takes a lot of time to build relationships so that trust is earned. Parents make comments frequently that we don’t understand their situations/lives and that is why we plan so much community outreach. Teachers also have an issue with many perceived apathetic parents and willingly admit they get to a point where they stop calling, sending notes home about concerns due to lack of response. Therefore, school/community relationships and setting up an action plan for promoting positive school to home communication will be key next school year.
Adding to above as our conversation continued after the post, we want to add another focus area. The AYP math scores that are so low in comparison to the passing rate for us for grades 3-5 made us realize that our black and SES subgroups need more math attention. This was discovered by us when we completed the parent engagement audit, specifically the table on the back. AYP for those 2 subgroups were in the mid-70% passing range, but our overall raw math passing rate was significantly higher. Our goal is to gain at least 10 percentage points next year in our AYP groups. This will discussed in August leadership meeting as we create our CSIP.
The Focus Area for Rivers Edge will be improving math scores for our students with disabilities. We arrived at this plan by reviewing subgroup testing data. We will specifically target our 5th grade students who are preparing for Course I math in middle school. Since we now have a Math Teacher in Residence, we are hoping to involve her as an integral part of our plan. Over the past three years, our disabilities subgroup’s math scores have been an average of a 22 percentage points below our school’s scores. Our goal is to close this achievement gap and have no more than a 15-percentage point difference. After we review SOL testing data this summer, we will determine whether or not our school-wide CSIP goal(s) will encompass math as well. We are considering a plan to improve critical thinking skills in the area of math with PLC groups focusing on topics such as performance based tasks, quality questioning, and other problem solving skills to coincide with the county’s algebra readiness initiative.
We discussed in a school of high academic achievers the lack of belonging potentially occurs with students who do not fall in the majority category. This may be due to students who do not meet the teacher’s perceived academic criteria, parent’s perception of academic norms, or socio-economic status. We discussed the potential for other prejudices that may exist; however, found that the academic arena is the biggest challenge in creating a culture of inclusiveness.
In further reflection from our school team and the audits, our focus area will be academic performance. Outside of the 95 percent majority category, 12 percent of our population falls in the area of special education or disadvantaged, this was a data point used in identifying the focus area. It is our goal that students in these categories feel included and a part of all educational experiences offered in our school. Much of the evaluation data collected will be qualitative in nature. As faculty and a school community we must identify and become aware of our own prejudices to improve. Discussion, conferences, staff development, etc. will be part of the process in moving us to a more equitable community.
-How did the team arrive on the Focus Area for the school? Disadvantaged – growing & most underrepresented; this will capture other subgroups
-What data point from the audits were considered in identifying the Focus Area?
the missing point
-What is the base line data point that needs improving? We used observational data to determine this need; approx. 1/3 of school population
-What percentage of improvement is desired through the action plans in the CSIP? 15 to 20%
-How can the whole school become involved in improving this data point? personalized contact from teacher requesting assistance for specific task & ensuring success; provide food as a drawing point
We have looked at both audits and taking into consideration the culture and climate of our school we feel it is more beneficial to focus on more school program opportunities to involve parents in the total school program and to volunteer. This includes targeting different student populations, for example upper grades 3-5, Caucasian parents, etc. It was a difficult decision because we reflected back on the discussion we had with our staff and their desire to focus on bullying. As a school we have devised a plan to address bullying for 2010-2011 school year, therefore more parental involvement will be our focus for this coalition based on the input received from each grade level on the parental engagement survey. Our baseline data was derived from PTA membership, PTA attendance, SPAC attendance and school events. We would like to improve by a minimum of 10 percentage points. As a school staff we will begin with the leadership team followed by breakout groups to brainstorm ways to enhance parental involvement programs we currently have and to brainstorm ideas for new activities. We will effectively implement this by forming committees for each program.
At Harvie Elementary, we are targeting contact with parents other than when we call to give not-so-good news. We feel our parental contact is only when we need parents to do something to assist with what their child is not doing at school. Our focus will be on making contact with parents on a regular basis for good news and/or to invite them to the school for activities, volunteering, or just for attendance at school programs, field day, lunch with their child, etc. Although we acknowledge that school staff is busy at the end of the day, this commitment will pay off throughout the year. Our goal is to have teachers contact each student’s parent(s) at least once per nine weeks for a positive comment/invitation. This increased contact will hopefully increase the parental perception of out programs at school.
At our school we also agree that a lot of the communication between the school and parents is negative, and we would also like to increase the positive communication. We would like to start focusing on this area as well, and we have started to initiate positive referrals to help out so that not all communication is negative. With the positive referrals we plan to continue using them during the next school year and would be happy to share them. Like you said it is hard to create a lot of positive interactions when everyone is so busy but in the end we feel as though the benefits of creating plans to increase positive involvement fair out weigh the negatives.
According to anecdotal guidance data, our school has found that there is a need for us to continue our focus on school citizenship. The underlined purpose of our school-wide program is to create a sense of belonging. Just as we strive to have every student be successful academically, we strive to have 100% of our student body feel a part of our school. We have formed a citizenship and recognition committee to focus on this area and to make this a school-wide effort.
Glen Lea started a citizenship program two years ago and it it takes time for the students to understand the meaning and purpose of good citizenship, but it does come. Students first learn the language and after learning the language comes understanding.
Focus Area: As a team we have decided to focus on the performance of students from low SES families and their parental involvement. This will include their academic performance, behavioral performance, and their absenteeism.
How did we arrive at this focus area: The team considered findings from both audits, teacher input, and studies of our school population. With this information we decided that our primary focus area is our disadvantaged population as whole, but not to include just a specific ethnicity.
What data point from the audits were considered in identifying the Focus Area?
We used the percent failing scores for the math and reading SOL’s and HAT tests, discipline referrals, suspensions, and absentee data. We also collected and analyzed data for parent engagement for extended periods of time, initial willingness to volunteer, and one time event participation.
What is the base line data point that needs improving?
The percent of disadvantaged students failing standardized testing, getting referred or suspended, and missing school. The percent of parents from the disadvantaged community participating in the school environment or community.
What percentage of improvement is desired through the action plans in the CSIP?
Academically we would like to see a 5% decrease, from the ’08-’09 data, in the amount of disadvantaged students failing the standardized tests.
For discipline issues, we would like to see a 2% decrease, from the ’08-’09 data, in the amount of disadvantaged students getting referred or suspended.
In the area of absenteeism, we want to see the percent of days absent in our disadvantaged population to decrease by 5% from the ’08-’09 data.
We hope to increase our parental involvement from the disadvantaged population.
How can the whole school become involved in improving this data point?
Once these students are identified, support for math and reading will be provided by the classroom teacher, with extra support from our math teacher in residence, Title 1 staff, PRIME and 2nd helping teachers, and our resource teacher.
The absenteeism will be addressed by making the teacher’s more aware of the protocol for absenteeism and having them become an active participant and asset in that system.
To decrease the amount of behavior problems with the students we plan to increase and improve our positive behavioral support programs.
After looking at our data on the Reading and Mathematics SOL pass rates, we determined that academically, we need to focus on our SPED students. Last year they were 20 percentage points below any other group in Math, and about 26 points in Reading. We already know that this year we had a higher VAAP and VGLA pass rate, but we will continue to look at ways to close this achievement gap.
As far as parent involvement, we identified the Hispanic and Black subgroups as needing the most attention. In both these groups there is very little participation in parent/teacher conferences, spirit nights and coffee hours. Since language is the biggest barrier for Hispanic parents, we know we can do more to include them. We would like to have an additional open-house specifically for our Spanish-speaking families, as well as meetings for them throughout the year. We also want to be more diligent about translating documents that go home, such as field trip permission slips and notices of special school events. We do get diverse parent attendance at our PEP Assemblies, where students are recognized for academic AND character achievement, movie nights and our annual International Dinner.
We discussed some fun and creative ways to excite staff next year about exploring equity and inclusion both in our school as a whole, and in their individual classrooms. We will use some abbreviated forms of the activities we did at our Coalition meetings, which powerfully guided us to look at our own experiences and biases. Using situational cards (“The principal has just told you that you will be teaching an all-male class. What is your first reaction?”) is also a good way to get an honest conversation started about our own views.
At Adams, we are focusing on increasing parent involvement from 32% to at least 50% during our 2010-2011 school year. Based on our parent engagement audit, we feel our parent involvement equitably represents our subgroups, however overall engagement could be higher. Our team plans on reestablishing successful programs from the past, such as Family Art Night, and continuing with PTA spirit nights within the community, Principal Chats, and our Math and Literacy nights.
We also saw a need to empower our staff to more effectively handle our most challenging behavior, as this is where we felt that Adams’ cycle of prejudice came to light. We plan on continuing with an ongoing teacher empowerment program.
We relate to your desire to empower faculty members when handling challenging students and behaviors. Our goal for the 2010 – 2011 school-year is to effectively prepare faculty for implementation of tier two behavior interventions. We realize that as we tackle this issue as a school, our attempt is to change teacher behavior in an effort to encourage positive student behavior.
Our CSIP this year focused on inviting more parents into the school day. Our volunteer log at the end of May documented 627 volunteers thus far during the school year. We invited parents to assist in the front office and implemented a Watch D.O.G.S. program. This program expanded our male volunteers by more than 90 new dads and granddads joining our volunteer pool. We hope to increase this success for next year as we welcome over 200 new students redistricted from Byrd Middle School. Our focus next year will be to integrate our new students but also our new parent community. Our school theme: “Mixing It Up” indicates a dedication to creating a fused community for all students. Our faculty supports our new mentoring program for 2010-11. Each adult staff member will supervise a group of mixed gender, mixed grade level group of 10-12 students. (We used the recent success at Elko as a model program) Faculty members met this year to develop lessons for our Monday sessions next year. We are also brainstorming for activities/events for welcoming parents into the PMS community.
After reviewing the data Longdale has decided to focus on academic performance specifically in the area of writing. Writing data showed a decline in writing scores at Longale in fourth grade over the past three years. A school-wide writing plan has not been consistent and the staff is looking for a common language when teaching writing. Next year we are implementing a school wide writing program called Being a Writer. Over the summer our staff will be trained in this program and then throughout the year we will focus our PLC’s on the writing program. We feel that the consistency of this writing program will help our teachers be on the same page when they are teaching writing therefore our students will see gains. We are hoping to see a 2-3% increase on our HATS and SOLs scores.
We also experienced a decline in our writing scores at the fourth grade level this spring. We feel the need to have a more comprehensive program across grade levels. We have asked for assistance from our language arts coach as we strive to identify Tier 1 best practices that result in improved writing skills. Due to budgetary concerns, we are not necessarily looking to purchase a commercial program and/or one that requires costly teacher preparation. Making writing a part of staff development through our PLC’s is a viable solution. This topic applies to the focus of our coalition work as our writing test results show weaker skills in our ESL, SpEd, Hispanic, and black student populations.
After reviewing the data, we have concluded that our focus area is effective Parental Engagement. Our goal is not to solely to get parents to volunteer or watch performances. We would like to design an effective and interactive Head Eagle Outreach Program. We presently hold Principal Coffees which allows parents to participate in specific forums. However with this program we would like to raise the level of involvement. We would like to provide academic refresher courses, computer training, and a parent liasion for each grade level. We would like to continue the Principal Coffees, but we would like to hold them during evening and morning hours to ensure that we are accommodating the parent’s work schedules. We are aware of academic trends and we have many programs and action plans for addressing the academic needs of the students. Also, we feel that with an improvement in the quality of parental engagement, the academic achievement gaps will grow narrower. Our ultimate goal is to build strong parent-school relationships. As stated in our vision statement, we would like for Elko to be a place where “There are Involved Families Who: are committed to and make sacrifices for their child’s education, support the school, value diversity, and value academic rigor and preparation for the 21st Century Student.” We are confident that this program will move us in that direction.
Freeman High School has always been called “The Freeman Family”. Students have always felt like the school has been a second home. This is not the case now. We have a new population of students that are being asked to adapt to our established structure rather than having their unique needs provided for. As a school, we are not addressing the academic, emotional, and social needs of our newest family members. We would like to make this our focus. Making learning reflect the needs of our students, and creating a community here at Freeman that includes everyone, and celebrates the diversity that gives us the quirky, unique student body at Freeman. With community, comes shared goals, despite and because of differences.
Freeman High School has always called itself “The Freeman Family.” Students have always felt like the school has been a second home. This is not the case now. We have a new population of students that are being asked to adapt to our established structure rather than having their unique needs provided for. As a school, we are not addressing the academic, emotional, and social needs of our newest family members. We would like to make this our focus. Making learning reflect the needs of our students, and creating a community here at Freeman that includes everyone, and celebrates the diversity that gives us the quirky, unique student body at Freeman. With community, comes shared goals, despite and because of differences.
Based on diversity in parent involvement, or lack thereof, our team would like to focus on “alternative forms of parent involvement.” We need to start thinking about how to involve parents in school in ways that accommodate their schedules and lifestyles. It is a rare parent at Skipwith who stays at home without younger children to watch who is available to come in and volunteer during the school day. We will focus on outreach in alternative ways – what does it mean to have parents involved? Does it have to mean coming to the school or can we broaden this definition?
At Godwin our focus area is the lack of minority students in upper level classes. Administrative walk-through data provided a basis for this focus; and the baseline from which we will operate deals with strategies getting students in the proverbial door and keeping them there through encouragement and hard work. Our population is 7.9% African American with less than 1% in higher level classes. Our goal is to revisit this issue considering the variable of removing S level classes next school year. The group will share this “eye opening’ information with the staff in the next school year. I think working with student and faculty groups we can achieve great things.
…Additionally, we will work through staff development and the inclusive community advisory group (made up of students in all grades) to implement these points. Through teachcer recommendations and parental support we believe we can imfluence change here.
How did the team arrrive at the Focus Area? Review of data from the Parent Engagement Equity Audit
What data points from the audits were considered in identifying the Focus Area? Several data points from the audit indicated that the numbers of parents volunteering in the classroom and/or participating in other school-related/PTA events are not proportionally representative of our subgroup populations.
What is the base line data point that needs improving? Increase the representation of student subgroups by their parents as classroom volunteers and in participation at school-related/PTA events. Volunteer application forms and PTA membership will initially be used to track data for 2010-2011.
What percentage of improvement is desired through the action plans in the CSIP? Actual participation and volunteerism should approximate actual student subgroup representation within 50%.
How can the whole school become involved in improving this data point?
Staff development activities and partnering with PTA leadership will be the primary foundation for working toward this goal.
While deliberating over current data including our CSIP, the Greenwood Team concluded that our focus area would be determined when testing results are returned. Currently, writing has been our focus area due to the fact that last year’s data resulted in the decline of our white population. But our focus area for the upcoming area is to be determined when data is reviewed from this year. Also, our efforts to keep all students and parents involved in Greenwood’s growth in building a strong sense of community is imperative, and present strategies to do so will remain in place. Test scores, parent surveys and additional input from faculty and staff will be considered when identifying the focus area. At that time, all will be charged with creating objectives and strategies to strive for improvement in the identified area.
Data show that despite a 40% decrease in discipline referrals, students in Tier III need more than Mustang Character Program that includes Mustang Bucks as an incentive. A challenge for us is the younger child (kindergarten) who physically hurts others, throws items, and has no regard for teachers’ directions. The other challenge is the ED student who disrupts the classroom with major outbursts and is aggressive towards peers and adults. Despite BIPs and Child Study intervention, learning time for ALL students is lost. For students with severe emotional concerns such as a bi-polar disability, we need to have alternatives to a collaborative classroom setting. Teachers will need staff development for developing strategies to assist students in becoming more successful.
After reviewing the data points from the audits, our team has decided to focus our efforts on improving parental involvement in the minority subgroups. Currently, most of the volunteer opportunities are predominately performed by Caucasian mothers of regular education students whose families are sustained by one working parent. During the 2009-2010 school year, 99% of the homeroom representatives and field day volunteers were Caucasian mothers. Due to the flexibility of their schedules, these mothers are afforded the opportunity to volunteer during the school day. However, after further examining our evening volunteer or participation opportunities, the results were consistent with the participation results of the events occurring during work hours. Our team will focus on the methods of communication utilized by the staff and offer the parents an opportunity express their preferred method of communication at the beginning of the school year. We are hoping that by contacting parents using their preferred means of communication (texting, emailing, letters, etc) the participation of the parents of minority subgroups will increase. Improving communication will enable these parents to be well-informed of upcoming events as well as feel included in the Maybeury community. We feel that the variety of types of communication serve the parents of different subgroups with the exception of parents who are not native English speakers. Therefore, we plan to have communications translated to the native language, if possible.
Based on various sets of data and our reflections as a team we have discussed coming up with a core system of values, as a school-wide program. This program will incorporate the cultural ideas of all of our staff members and students. Having guidelines based on these values in place will create a positive, cohesive, family-oriented environment that also promotes personal responsibility.
Increasing parental involvement will be a focus area for Lakeside next year. We have noted that our parents support certain events, like field day, PTA Christmas breakfast, Diversity Night, and Book Fair evenings in large numbers. However, events such as Title 1 informational sessions and workshops, principal coffees, and parent teacher conferences have low parent attendance. Because of the confidentiality of disadvantaged records, we were unable to accurately report our parent engagement in this area. We feel that if we have access to the disadvantaged records and could look at how often these parents participate in school events and volunteering, we could better get to the heart of why our parents are not coming out to all of our school functions at the same rate. We also feel that our PTA board is not representative of our parent population and have heard from some of our ESL parents that they do not feel like they are a part of the school. We would like to address this more and create opportunities for our ESL parents to become more involved. We discussed taking more of our school events into the community rather than just having them at school and hosting parent focus groups to gain more information on how to get them more involved.
After reviewing data, our team has chosen to focus on reaching a specific group of students whose behavior and academic data indicates a high level of need. Our effective school-wide discipline behavior data helped us target tier two students. When looking more closely at these students, it became apparent the group is comprised of students from one neighborhood. The team would like to maintain a focus on building better communication with parents of this group while implementing tier two behavior interventions. We plan to track this group closely and collect data on using office referrals and benchmark testing. We hope to see a decrease in office referrals combined with an increase in benchmark tests and report card data. The faculty will be included, as they will be providing the data, and participating in additional efforts to contact and involve parents.
Based on our data, we have determined that our focus are is parental involvement and awareness. After reviewing the data, we realized that our parental involvement is equitable among the subgroups, but minimal overall. We would like to increase the quantity and quality of parental involvement by creating more positive interactions between the school and the parents. One idea we may consider is establishing a parenting academy that focuses on challenges of the 21st Century (ex. sexting, social networks, cyber bullying, study habits and discipline). This is a program that would be developed to involve parents, students, teachers and staff.
Another idea suggested is to create a committee that is centered on increasing parental involvement. This committee will create plans of action and set objectives for the year. We would like to create more social activities that involve parents and teacher interaction not solely based on curricular information. We plan to increase positive communication from teachers to parents (ex. positive referrals).
After looking at both audits, historical pass rates, and current trends we have determined the need to focus on meeting the needs of our various subgroups academically and socially. Focusing on differentiated instruction in the area of reading will allow us to reach our special education population that has experienced very low pass rates in comparison to the general education population, reach our gifted and talented population that is achieving but may need that extra push, and reach our average population through direct instruction that raises the bar. In addition, we see the academic component as being linked to the social piece. Many of our volunteers and/or engaged parents are those of students that excel and are in contact often with the school. It is our hope to reach out to our parents that are reluctant to become involved and/or have not been involved for various reasons through a cultural fair, Watch DOGS, and other opportunities that open up the lines of communication. A very low percentage of our minority families are involved in the PTA or volunteer on a regular basis. Forming a trusting, open relationship with all parents will benefit our students tremendously.
Echo Lake’s response to Glen Allen’s focus area:
Much like Glen Allen Elementary, we here at Echo Lake are continuing to focus on meeting the needs of various subgroups. There is a school-wide focus on meeting AYP targets in subgroups and through data collection and reflection, we are specifically looking at African American students to ensure that they are continuing to work above their ability. Between our co-teaching program to meet special education students’ needs and our gifted/advanced class to meet our higher ability students’ needs, there is a focused effort on individualization. Overall, we focus on SOL pass advance rates in all classrooms because we have such a high ability students and cluster group these children especially in reading and math in all classrooms. This year we began a “STEP UP” Program in April running through May to target students during their lunch period that needed motivation and encouragement. The administration met with approximately 10-12 students weekly to chart their academic performance and provide encouragement to always do their best work. We will track those student’s overall SOL/ HAT progress to measure the effectiveness of the program.
Based on our data, we feel that our focus will be on parental involvement, particularly within our ESL and economically disadvantaged populations. It has been stated so many times in this blog how difficult it is to adequately involve parents who struggle with English and/or work schedules. We will strive next year to find innovative ways to encourage this group of parents to participate in their child’s school experience. This may mean redefining our expectations to include some “out of the box” opportunities that make all of our parents feel welcome and included. The more families feel that we consider them partners in educating their child, hopefully, the more involvement we will see.
At Pemberton, our focus area is a group of students who are both special education and minority students. Our behavior referral data clearly shows that this group has had the highest number of disciplinary referrals and behavior interventions. Throughout the grades, we are working on behavior incentive plans, citizenship and bullying education to try to decrease the number of referrals and give these students tools to use in place of anger and aggression.
Teacher and student mentoring, and frequent communication between teachers and administrators help us to work on these issues. We are trying very hard to make sure that all grade level teachers and specials teachers are part of the continuing effort over the years to help these students as they progress through school – in other words, it takes a village, and these students belong to everyone – not just the current case manager or home room teacher. We also are working very hard to build strong, cooperative relationships based on trust with the parents of these students, so that they will become more involved in the joint effort for success.
Echo Lake’s Focus:
Here at Echo Lake, we completed the Equity Data and Parent Engagement Audits and these data reflects our current focus on differentiation and AYP subgroups. After conducting our quarterly assessments and AYP subgroup analysis for all students not meeting the benchmark, we noticed a trend regarding African-American students either not passing the tests or being overly represented in our bubble groups. We also reflected on our comparison scores between 3rd Grade Otis-Lennon tests and 4th Grade Stanford-10 testing. We documented a trend of African-American students’ ability going up but it is not commensurate to their achievement. Notably in the fall of 2009, there was a 7 point discrepancy between ability and achievement scores for our African American students.
A continued focus will remain on co-teaching programs to meet special education students’ needs and our gifted/advanced class to meet our higher ability students’ needs. Overall, we will continue to focus on SOL pass advance rates in all classrooms because we have such a high ability students and cluster group these children especially in reading and math. This year we began a “STEP UP” Program in April running through May to target students during their lunch period that needed motivation and encouragement, especially targeting our AYP subgroup kids. The administration met with approximately 10-12 students weekly to chart their academic performance and provide encouragement to always do their best work. We are also beginning a Mentor Reading Buddy Program in the fall of 2010 to provided targeted assistance to our at-risk students that may not be meeting benchmark goals. We also piloting an early bird club in 4th grade to focus on pre-teaching and remediation in mathematics. We will continue to explore additional learning opportunities to ensure success for all students but especially our AYP subgroup students in special education and our African-American students.
Johnson ES has increased the number of parent nights over the last two years to include literacy nights, math nights, movie nights, concerts,and international nights. We found that engagement of our second language families has been the most difficult. However their support and attendence at international night has been overwhelming. Family movie nights also have been well attended. Other PTA events have also brought many families from diverse backgrounds especially the events at a public place. In addition our connect ed phone calls are done in both english and spanish which has increased engagement and participation. Still there is a hugh barrier with second language families and this has an inpact on student performance. Limited resources provides challenges in making connections and engaging second language speaking families.
As a school, with 30 percent of our families second language, we would like to focus on improving communication practices at the classroom level with second language speaking families. As a school we will come up with an action plan to accomplish this given the limited resources.
After reviewing our data from the equity reports here at Hermitage Tech. Center we need to focus on academic performance. We used the data from our credential testing to indentify our Focus Area. The base line data point that we have identified our special needs population as having a higher failure rate. With an increasing special needs population we have become more aware that our teachers need more training and time specifically set aside for IEP education and action plans. Through this action plan in our CSIP we would like to improve from a 65% pass rate to a 75% pass rate on credential testing for the upcoming school year.
Our school wide focus area is continuing and improving parental involvement. This is important to all teachers at Ashe because we know it can improve a child’s success and the home-school collaboration is just one of the important elements out of a child’s educational success. The data point we used when identifying the focus area was thinking about the total number of students in our school and how many families we don’t know/see attend school wide programs. We would like to see different families and not the “same” participants all the time. A usual trend in a school is the same parents continually show up to back to school night, conferences, school wide functions, and participate in fundraisers. We would to bring this gap together by working hard to rebuild our PTA. Our PTA is in the process of being re-organized we hope this will offer more opportunities for the parents across the board to be involved who we do not often see participate.
Based on data from the Parent Engagement Survey and the responses from teachers on the School Climate Survey, building connections with parents and engaging them in their child’s education will be focus areas during the 2010-11 school year. Throughout this past year, we added four ESL dinners/programs, movie nights and a literacy night to invite parents into the building. All of these events were successful and it helped bring parents into the building on a non PTA night which generally included a music program for one grade level. Even with these additions, we need to get more parents engaged in the school and volunteering to help in order for them to feel more connected and invested in their child’s education. Also, discipline issues within our African American population is disproportionate to the number of other students demonstrating discipline issues. In the coming year, programs to address parent needs and ways to build engagement with their child’s education will continue to be studied so that effective steps can be taken for the benefit of all. Two other activities already in place for the fall are 1) To train teachers on how to deal with a variety of parental issues and 2) The implementation of a Character Education program. With our high ESL population as well as the number of households where both parents work, we will need to be creative with the activities and programs implemented. Dumbarton has a history of high achieving students in all AYP subgroups but we know that we could be even more successful if we could get more parents involved in the school community.
Chamberlayne has taken a good look at the audits and has decided that getting parents more involved during school and after school is where our focus needs to be for the year. We have plenty of parents who attend PTA programs when their child performs, but the staff at Chamberlyane feels that we need to work on different strategies for getting parents more involved in all aspects of their child’s learning. We are looking into implementing a PASS program grades 3-5 this year. PASS stands for Parents Assisting in Student Success. The parents can attend meetings every other week to have a better understanding of what goes on in the classroom, how to help their child study, and learn a variety of strategies on how to help their child be more successful in all academic areas. We are also looking into having “speciality” nights once a nine weeks: literacy night, math workout, super scientists, and bringing history alive.
At Laburnum, we will be focusing on increasing parent involvement during our 2010-2011 school year especially with our ESL parents. We feel our parent involvement could be higher. We plan to ask each grade level to submit steps in what they are doing as a team to support parent involvement and what we can do as a school to achieve this goal. We will continue to provide opportunities for our parents through newsletters, Connect-Ed, Family Math and Reading Night, and continuing with PTA spirit nights within the community, Muffins for Mom, Doughnuts for Dad.
We are going to ask our staff to effectively communicate amongst each other and with Administration so that we are all on the same page. We also want our staff to create classrooms that are equitable. We hope that this will enable us to handle our most challenging behavior and dissipate some of the preconceived prejudices that exist.
Review of our data and our focus started this school year, Sandston will continue to design our school wide Positive Behavior Support system addressing behaviors noted by teachers through a survey and discussion. Training has occurred and behavior systems with clear, simple concepts are being finalized over the summer and will be put in place in September 2010. Teacher training of the discipline system including the concepts presented in the second session “cycle of prejudice”, will be included in the discussion surrounding this topic.
Additional review of the data presents the need to improve parent involvement in all programs presented at the school other than performances, field day and back to school night. Parents do not access the curriculum based nights in the same manner, especially parents whose students have behavioral and/or academic deficits. When reviewing our upcoming Positive Behavioral Plan, additional focus will be put on communicating with parents more often with positive messages. Within these conversations, personal invitations to workshops and other parent involvement needs can be addressed. Staff communication for these “positive parent messages” will need to take into account the “cycles of prejudice” and “healthy communication” concepts, to insure that parents feel they have been “heard” and their concerns taken into account. These contacts may build more trusting relationships with our most challenging parents/students that could increase parent participation in all programs.
Based on the Parent Engagement Audit we at Glen Lea felt that we worked the past two years to see a significant change in parent involvement. We have implemented the Watch D.O.G.S. program and a Parental Involvement Committee. The Henrico County Council of PTAs recognized Glen Lea at their annual banquet in May for increasing PTA membership by at least ten over the 2008-2009 school year. The Parent Engagement Survey did not show an statistically significant disparities between sub-groups.
However, we know that our work is not done. We have volunteers for field trips and parents attend PTA meetings, but we do want to do more to make sure that parents from all sub-groups are better represented.
Teachers will be charged to contact parents to attend PTA meeting and SPAC Title I meetings. For spanish speaking parents we can use the translator program to send PTA notices to those parents. Our goal is to increase parental involvement by 10% for the 2010-2011 school year.
Colonial Trail ES would like to focus on reviewing our current Bullying Program within our school. Although data does not suggest a huge bullying program within our school, even one student who feels he/she is being bullied is one two many. Administration will work closely with the counselors to assess how the program is used currently and how it can be changed, if needed, to help all students, parents, and teachers better identify and deal with bullying situations.
Holman Middle will have numerous initiatives as we create the culture and climate of a new school. Of great importance is to set up an environment where the faculty feels valued, trusted, and respected. This will need to be modeled by the leadership team and by providing opportunities to interact and dialogue with members of all departments.
This will not be easily accomplished and will not happen over one meeting, but instead will be an ongoing process, building and strengthening from one meeting to the next as the discussions ensue. To begin this, the leadership team will be exposed to team building exercises and to a staff development workshop which will instruct and enable the Holman Leadership Team to maximize each individual’s instructional leadership strength to better the instruction, climate, and culture of Holman Middle School.
The expected positive results will manifest itself through strong collaborative lessons, innovative implementation of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) curriculum, and in creating the most optimal environment conducive to teaching and learning in the 21st Century. With these powerful lessons and committees designed to create the optimal environment, students will continuously be exposed to enriching activities and lessons which will provide each individual student to reach their full potential for ALL students, regardless of race, culture, etc.