ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
Schools throughout USD 480 continue to show progress through the High Reliability Schools (HRS) program, and Eisenhower Middle School has indeed been making great strides.
“We had a great response rate from the students at 92 percent, and we always have great numbers from the students since it’s mandatory for them. 78 percent of our staff participated in the survey, so that was also pretty strong engagement,” Principal Randi Jones said. “Our parent response was the lowest, we had only 25 percent of parents respond, which might indicate some concern about how this data would be used. I went back, and we’ve been doing a similar survey with our Leader In Me work for the past five years, and for our first year in 2022, we also saw a low response rate there, but as we’ve utilized that data and shared feedback with the parents about how we’re incorporating their voices, the response rate trickled up each year and now we have almost half of parents responding to the survey. As you all have seen with past presentations, there are eight indicators in Level One of the HRS framework, and we identified all the indicators that scored 3.5 or higher as a strength indicator, and for Eisenhower M.S., those were indicators 1.1 through 1.5 and then 1.8. We also identified a couple indicators we created some action plans for in order to make some improvements, and those were 1.6 and 1.7.”
Eisenhower Middle School Leader In Me Coordinator Shadra Thomas said there were multiple strengths found through the survey.
“One of our top strengths was how we have a safe and supportive environment at Eisenhower M.S., and that means we can promote a positive environment and student safety,” Thomas said. “Some good things we have in place include monthly drills, and we go over those procedures with our staff members and students, and the students let their parents know what’s going on. We have clear expectations in the classrooms, the hallways, the restrooms, and those are posted throughout the building so everyone knows what’s expected of that particular area. We have a full-time School Resource Officer (SRO), and he helps with some of the bigger tasks and work when it’s needed, but he’s also out and about with the students at lunch or in the hallways, so he’s building a great rapport with them. Last year, we brought in a CPR instructor, and many of us took that course, so we’re now familiar with how that is supposed to be handled and those procedures if that kind of emergency should occur. We’re very consistent with what we have in place in the building and how everything is enforced.”
Fellow Eisenhower M.S. teacher Shelby Bennett said it is very important for students, faculty and the community have a voice when it comes to the school.
“Another area of strength we identified was the capacity teachers have in order to have their voices heard in a variety of ways throughout the school. I feel like the admin behind me go above and beyond to seek out teachers’ input throughout the school year, whether it’s through more informal face-to-face conversations or more formal survey collections,” Bennett said. “There’s a lot of infrastructure we’ve built in that regard, and I feel like within our school, teachers feel comfortable enough to express their opinions – those opinions aren’t always positive, but I think it’s great the teachers feel comfortable enough to express what they’re really feeling and thinking. We also have some really strong teams we have developed in the school, and that also provides a shared space for teachers to be able to express themselves. One example of that is our lighthouse team, which we also refer to as our leadership team, and they all lead action teams through our Leader In Me initiative. Every staff member, especially the Certified staff members, have a voice to help make decisions within the school, and things we have planned come directly from those action teams. We also have the AVID Site Team, and anytime a team has capacity to provide input or support a schoolwide initiative, it happens within those spaces, and teachers feel comfortable providing not just their time and feedback, but also bringing other people along with them.
With that, they also have the capacity to impact the school’s schoolwide improvement plan, Bennett said.
“Throughout the years, we’ve had attendance initiatives, family engagement initiatives, and a lot of that work is supported by members of these teams. We’ve had conferences happening recently, and one of the action teams is pulling in student voices as well as teacher voices to share Leader In Me lessons with families, and that’s all been done by the action teams and the teachers leading them,” Bennett said. “One of my favorite things to talk about is our Professional Learning Community (PLC) process – this scored a 4.2 out of 5 from our teachers, and that is a really big cornerstone of the work we do. Because we have such strong PLCs in place, we’ve been able to work very diligently and efficiently on standards alignment work the KESA team has brought to the teachers this year, and because that work is in place, we have protected time. Even as our schedules have changed year to year, the one thing that hasn’t changed is protecting the teachers’ PLC and collaboration time, and they do a lot of meaningful work within that space. They meet every week to work on instructional planning and diving into student data, so one of the biggest impacts we can have on student performance is coming from that PLC space and their ability to consistently meet with one another to talk about instruction, strategies, student engagement, student motivation and student performance data. Through PLCs, we’re also able to drive systematic improvement. It’s always a cycle – there will always be spaces when students are performing successfully and spaces when we identify gaps, and that’s able to happen because of the PLC processes we have in place at Eisenhower M.S. It also really highlights the work we’re doing through standards alignment and the Level 2 work we’ll be doing through HRS coming up.”
Like everything else, however, Thomas said there are improvements to be made.
“One of the areas where we know we need to grow – and this has been the trend in every other school I’ve been in – is with trying to find more ways for parents and other people in the community to give input on how things are going at the school,” Thomas said. “That’s always a bit of a struggle. The parents actually said we did well with this, but the students felt very different about that. We do have some things in place – we worked really hard to get the Student Lighthouse team up and running and make it strong, and they are the ones actually in charge of putting together our monthly assemblies and running them and all of that. We go in and do our part if necessary, but that’s really it. They’ve also put out suggestion boxes for our Wildly Important Goals (WIGs), and when our classes reach those, the Student Lighthouse team gets input on how to celebrate all of that. We’ve also got some parent questions – we send out a weekly newsletter that includes a QR code where parents can respond. We would like to see that grow more, but it is brand new, so I think we just need a bit of time to fully get that off the ground. On top of that, we do have some more action plans because we do think we can really strengthen this. With the parents, we want to continue our quarterly Site Council meetings – at those, the parents have been giving some great recommendations on what they’d like to see changed or implemented or information they’d like to continue receiving. We’re also asking how we can promote our Site Council since it’s not really a big group at this time, so we’d like to see that grow. It’s not a big group, but we have some parents who are really dedicated and come to every meeting, so we like to say we’re small but mighty. We’d also like to incorporate that two-way communication, the weekly parent newsletters, and strengthen that as well. It’s all about that communication because we want our parents to have as much information as possible and get as much input from everyone possible.”
“Another area that needs growth is the success of the whole school and the individuals in the school being acknowledged appropriately,” Jones added. “Some of those things we already had in place prior to the survey being collected include Warrior Way-To-Goes, who are students who receive acknowledgement from a teacher for the week, and we’re good about sharing those on our social media pages. We also have an Educator of the Month who’s recognized at our assembly. As a result of the survey, we’ve also started a weekly parent newsletter that includes shoutouts and celebrations for the parents who aren’t on social media but still want to know what’s going on at the school. We’ve also started including staff shoutouts in the staff newsletter we put out so they get acknowledged in front of their peers and get recognized. We’ve also increased promotion of some of the programs and systems we have at Eisenhower M.S. We will continue with the Warrior Way-To-Gos, and we’ll start looking at ways for ALL of our students to get recognized in some fashion and make sure it’s not the same students over and over again, because everyone deserves a shoutout for the good work they do. We’ve also done a lot to provide assessment data to the parents so they know what’s going on and acknowledge that growth. We’ve also done a lot of work to recognize Classified and Certified staff members, and the students love being able to celebrate them at the monthly assembly, and they all get a small token of appreciation. Again, it’s all about showing our appreciation for our staff because they all do a wonderful job with the students day in and day out, and they deserve to be recognized.”