ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Schools throughout USD 480 have been taking part in the High Reliability Schools (HRS) program, and as MacArthur Elementary School Principal Dr. Maureen Richard tells it, her school has discovered a lot of strengths throughout the process.

“Our areas of strength, to start off with, include how our staff perceive the school environment to be safe, and our students, parents and overall community also perceive the school environment to be safe,” Richard said. “As an elementary school, a lot of times, we’re the first experience as they start with USD 480, and they’re trusting their youngest with us, so it’s a big point of pride for parents to say they feel safe bringing their children to MacArthur Elementary School and they’ll be taken care of that day and learn. I was really proud how we got such high ratings from parents and the teachers in that regard. Another strength is our teachers have formal roles in the decision-making process regarding schoolwide initiatives. We do have different teams set up in different areas of the school where there’s faculty support, whether it’s choosing our staff member of the month, the student(s) of the month, all the potlucks, instructional strategies, etc. We have several teams, and they all rather run themselves at this point while still supporting what’s going on throughout the building, whether it’s our schoolwide success team that oversees the Watch D.O.G.S. or our spirit week team or whatever happens to be going on. That said, I feel like we need to keep them on our radar so we make sure they remain mostly self-sufficient.”

Another area of strength Richard said was discovered was collaboration.

“We have collaborative groups that regularly interact to address common issues regarding curriculum, assessments, instruction and achievement of our students,” Richard said. “This year, we implemented the collaboration time in the morning, and the teachers meet twice a week with their grade-level team or interventionists or with different grade levels, if necessary. It’s protected time in the morning where all of our Certified staff is available to look at data or support students in different ways, and that’s been very useful this year. The teachers and parents also know we have a budget and we stick to it.”

Even with all the strengths discovered, Richard said there is always room for improvement.

“One of the areas we feel we can improve in is for teachers to have formal ways to provide input regarding the optimal functioning of the school. That was one of our lowest ratings from teachers across the board, but I feel like there are some small tweaks we could make that greatly improve that score,” Richard said. “Students and parents and other members of the community also indicated they would like more formal ways to provide that input to us. Another area of improvement, which I know has been brought up in the other presentations, is the success of the whole school and the individuals within the school being properly acknowledged for their work, and that was among the lowest-scored indicators with our students.”

One of the areas Richard said staff is going to focus on is students and staff having more formal ways to provide input, along with their parents.

“Something we’re going to implement is student surveys to figure out where students feel safe and/or unsafe, whether that’s in the classroom or at recess. We want to identify those areas so we can show that support,” Richard said. “For our staff, we do quarterly surveys already, and we take that feedback and try to make any adjustments we can and improve where we can. I think the biggest piece of that is communicating out those changes and closing that loop because we want to make changes based on what’s shared with us, but we can do better about communicating what changes have actually been made based on those suggestions. We would also love to see more participation with our Site Council, we have opened that up to all parents based on guidance from Ms. [Kendra] Haskell. In terms of celebrations, we’re first going to ask the students how they would want to be celebrated. We have a lot of great ideas and thoughts about how to do that, but maybe the students themselves feel a little differently. One of the ideas was having a Student of the Month gallery wall, like some other schools do. We would also like to know how the staff would want to be celebrated because again, maybe they have some different ideas, and that was big on the staff survey this time around. We also do schoolwide shoutouts on our social media pages and share a lot on there.”