ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

The schools throughout USD 480 have been making much progress through their High Reliability Schools (HRS) work, including Seymour Rogers Middle School.

Principal Jason Diseker said there are multiple areas of focus for the school.

“One of the things we’ve noticed in this process is the parents really think highly of the school. They think we’re doing great, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and the students trended about the same way, they also think we’re doing a good job,” Diseker said. “We’re really focusing on what our teachers and administrators are thinking about, because that’s really where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. With the survey, we administrators took it, as well as 44 teachers, more than 100 parents, and the majority of the Seymour Rogers Middle School student body. When we first started breaking down the data, I remember thinking ‘I can’t wait to get into all of this!’”

“One of the overall strengths across all the stakeholder groups is we have a safe and orderly environment – we had consistently high ratings there across all the groups surveyed, and that was great to see,” Seymour Rogers Middle School teacher Brandon Morgan added. “Our collaboration and PLC structures also ranked pretty highly by the teachers – this year, we started having PLCs before school on a specific day so we had the necessary amount of time and didn’t have to pull anyone from their planning period or anything like that, and we’ve seen a lot of success there too. We did discover three areas where we could grow, with one of them being teachers having a more formal role in the decision-making process of the building. Another area of growth was teachers and staff having more formal methods of providing input regarding the optimal functioning of the school, and we’ve done that this year through multiple surveys. The final area of growth was the success of the entire school and individuals being celebrated and acknowledged, which we’ve also taken steps toward.”

“We do a really good job with safety within our building, but we want to be sure we’re constantly staying strong with that and communicating with parents so they maintain that high confidence in us and continue trusting us with their children,” fellow teacher Nikki Cole added. “We also want to maintain our strong collaborations so our teachers continue to have those opportunities to work together. We discovered there is some work to be done in terms of making the students’ voices heard and making sure we’re providing opportunities for growth.”

Fellow teacher Teresa Louderback and Assistant Principal Dedre Schneider said teachers are looking for more ways to share their voice.

“Indicator 1.3 is about the decision-making roles of the teachers, and as Mr. Diseker said, we got some really good rankings there – a 3.5 is almost unanimous agreement, a 3 is more neutral, and a 2.5 means there are some people who disagree,” Louderback said. “There is some growth in these areas we need to make, but we have done some work toward that. We reestablished the Building Leadership Team (BLT) after letting it slide for a few years, and that team is a direct connection between the teachers and administrators. There are many times a teacher feels they can’t go to the administration about an issue, but there are enough people on that team now to help with that, and teachers know they can be very open with us during those meetings about what’s bothering them or some good things they’ve noticed. Some decisions need to be made by the administration without teacher input, and that was one of the areas where we scored kind of low on the previous survey, but we’ve been working really hard on being more transparent about what the surveys are used for and how that data will be used. It’s important to give the teachers that raw feedback and a home place to store that information so everyone has access to it.”

“Indicator 1.5 is about faculty and staff having formal ways to give input regarding optimal operations of the school. This was one our teachers resoundingly said they felt they needed more information on, and once we started diving into it all, there were a few things we decided to go ahead and do, including the reestablishment of that BLT. There is a member of that team in each hallway to help aid all of that, so those conversations can happen during passing periods. With the teachers’ response rates to the surveys, that was a big thing – we had given out a survey in October before the HRS, and from that information, teachers resoundingly said nothing was being done in terms of discipline and they weren’t seeing any progress made in that area. Every administrator in every school everywhere hears that multiple times throughout their career, so we decided to do discipline by the numbers – every two weeks, we send out that information, and that includes how many parent communications took place, the amount of log entries by teachers and administrators, the number of in-school and out-of-school suspensions we’ve had, and the number of students currently at the FOCUS alternative school.”

Part of that work, Schneider continued, was reorganizing the school’s tardy process.

“Students thought they didn’t have to show up to class on time and have it be no big deal, so we took a harder look at our tardy policy and how we could tighten things up,” Schneider said. “There are a lot of students who got sent to in-school suspension because of excessive tardiness to class, and there’s one student currently at FOCUS because she didn’t care to get to class on time and was constantly disrupting class because she was coming in late. After we gathered that data, teachers realized how much was actually going on and how busy things were. We’ve also been working on more transparent communication – right before spring break, the BLT sent out a survey that featured 10 or 12 questions, and after all of that, we took an hour out of the professional development day to go over everything the respondents said they didn’t know or weren’t sure of.”

Fellow teacher Marisol Peña said another area of improvement is recognizing achievements throughout the school.

“Indicator 1.7 is about  the success of the school as a whole, as well as individuals within the school, being appropriately recognized. This goes back to what Mr. Diseker talked about earlier in terms of teachers being harshest on ourselves, and the responses indicate how we as teachers sometimes feel like our individual accomplishments aren’t adequately acknowledged or celebrated, and it’s the same for other individuals throughout the school,” Peña said. “Because we tend to be our own harshest critics, one of the things building leadership did was send out a survey asking how we could celebrate our teachers and staff and everyone else, and how they wanted to be celebrated. We’ve recently gotten together as the BLT and started to really dive into that data and figure some things out. We haven’t gone into EVERYTHING there, but we’ve been talking. The Student Lighthouse Team has also been working to figure out some ways to celebrate the students’ accomplishments and hard work and how frequently that happens. Something Mr. Diseker brought to our attention was how we have monitors in the school that haven’t been fully put in yet, and that’s something we’re working on.”