ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

The schools throughout USD 480 have been doing a lot of work as a result of recent High Reliability Schools (HRS) surveys, and Monday evening, Meadowlark Elementary School presented its update to the USD 480 school board.

“Since receiving the results, we have done an extensive amount of data diving and root cause analysis with our Building Leadership Team (BLT), the main goal of that was to examine the trends better beyond the survey itself,” Meadowlark Elementary School Principal Ashley Bruce said. “This process has been very rigorous, it has been very challenging, but as a new principal, it has been very valuable. For me, it’s really strengthened my framework for my own accountability, and it’s also provided clearer direction and helped me prioritize the systems and aspects that matter the most in terms of our school culture as well as the systems and framework that help strengthen the safety, support, and collaboration in our school environment. The survey data showed our strengths were indicators 1.1 (Faculty and staff perceive the school environment as safe and orderly), 1.2 (Students, parents, and community perceive the school environment as safe and orderly), 1.4 (Teachers and staff work collaboratively to address common issues regarding curriculum, assessment, instruction, and academic success of all students), and 1.8 (Management of fiscal, operational, and technological resources directly supports teachers), and that was across the board, meaning students, parents and faculty/staff all responded positively. We looked at other areas, and our BLT identified indicators 1.3 (Teachers are given formal roles in the decision-making process for school initiatives), 1.5 (Faculty and staff have formal ways to give input regarding optimal operations of the school), 1.6 (Parents, students and community members have formal ways to give input regarding optimal operations of the school) and 1.7 (Success of the school as a whole as well as individuals within the school, is appropriately recognized) as areas where some growth is needed.”

“As Ashley said, the survey showed out school is perceived as safe and orderly, our teacher teams and collaborative groups regularly interact, and we have multiple resources that support our teachers and staff,” Meadowlark Assistant Principal Molly Colvin said. “Teachers rated indicator 1.1 at 4.0, students rated it at 4.7 and parents also rated it at 4.7. Some of the work we’ve done just in the past year for safe and orderly schools is including starting the school year with practicing tornado drills with the students and showing where to go and what to do and how it works. Last summer, Ashley and I walked through the school with Chad [Mease] to really find out where the safe places are and where the reinforced places are so we could have a better understanding of where we could shelter the students. A lot of our spaces are crowded when it comes to tornado drills, so making sure we have the students in the safest and most protected areas of the school was really important to us. We also took time on one of our professional development days to go over ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) drills and scenarios. We went through every hallway and talked about how teachers could best react to such situations and help keep the students safe. We recently had an ALICE drill, and we discovered we need some work for when we get to our gathering area, so we’ll be doing some practice there. Staff is also surveyed after those drills so administration can learn what staff thought about the drill and its overall execution, and there’s a lot of information gleaned from that. Something else that was implemented a couple years ago, before Ashley and I were moved into administration, was changes to our dismissal. We adjusted the end-of-day bell schedule to where walkers and kindergarteners get dismissed slightly earlier than the rest of the school – with the walkers, we get them to the crosswalk and across the street so we don’t have to worry about the car traffic, and we have a pretty big group of students who walk. Another thing is before dismissal, the student tells the teacher ‘I see my parent,’ and the car has to be parked so no one’s running amok while all the traffic is happening.”

Colvin added collaboration has also been extremely important. 

“With indicator 1.4, we have team time or Professional Learning Community (PLC) time where teachers come, and we talk about a lot of things. We would like that to be more data-focused, but there’s a lot that comes in that needs talked about, whether it’s messages from the Central Office or administrative team, or whatever happens to come in for that meeting,” Colvin said. “We also have collaboration time two days a week from 7:35 to 7:55 a.m., and teachers are able to use this time for data collection/dissection, planning for the week, whatever they need to do. We have committee meetings teachers can be part of, and we also have new teacher meetings every Thursday. With the new teacher meetings, any interim and certified staff members who are new are in attendance, and there’s discussion about iReady, lesson planning, CKLA, whatever those teachers need help with. Recently, we’ve been talking more about end-of-year procedures and how that work goes. With indicator 1.8, something we started last year was with teachers going through LETRS training — on Thursday mornings, we had paraeducators who helped cover teachers who was going through that training for 30 minutes so they could have that uninterrupted time to do that work. That’s been very successful and very much appreciated by those teachers, and they’re not missing any actual instructional time.”

While there have been a lot of successes, BLT members Alyce Williams and Morgan Potts said there is room for growth and improvement.

“Last year, Meadowlark Elementary School had a complete change in administration, and I know they’re also adjusting to their new roles,” Williams said. “There was limited guidance from the district at that time, so it made that transition much more challenging, added to the confusion and feelings of uncertainty for the school. As we’ve been working to adjust, we’ve recognized there have been some growing pains along the way. Because of all of that, we’ve experienced a lot of changes happening all at once, especially with our expectations and procedures – with our previous admin, we knew exactly what to expect, but the past couple years, everything’s been different for everyone, which is reflected in the survey data. With indicator 1.3, when we looked at our root causes, we discovered teachers feel there’s a lack of a formal decision-making structure, teacher leadership roles aren’t quite clearly defined, and input is collected but not clearly communicated. There’s been some confusion among teachers about which supervisors are assigned to which paraeducators, what decisions teachers actually do have input on, who’s actually responsible for making certain decisions, or how certain decisions are made after surveys are completed and the data is gathered. With that in mind, the first thing we wanted to do is clarify and publish teacher leadership roles, so we created a document that lists all the teachers and paraeducators and their supervisors, and the goal of that was to make sure everyone knows exactly who to go to with questions or anything else they need. We also created a matrix collaboratively during team time, and this is where staff came together during PLCs.”

“Another area we discovered is in need of growth was with indicators 1.5 and 1.6. Because they’re pretty similar, we put them together. With this, I have to note the input from students and their parents was very high, which is always a good sign,” Potts added. “The students and parents rated these pretty high, but because the teachers’ ratings were lower, we decided to focus on how we could make these improvements for teachers and staff. In looking at our root cause analysis, the first point is we have a history of low participation with our Site Council, so one discussion we had was how we see a lot of participation with the more fun events like the parent nights and family fun nights. However, despite the emails and other reminders we send out, we struggle to get parents in the building for things like Site Council to help them have more of a voice with that. Teachers also indicated they wanted to be kept more in the loop in regards to Site Council and what information is being shared in those meetings and how Site Council is run in general. As has already been mentioned, we’ve seen changes in administration at the school, so teachers are still a little hesitant about utilizing that open door policy to go and visit with them and share their questions and concerns. That’s something that will just take some time and will be continually worked on. We also want to utilize surveys more for parents, staff and students, and there are a few different ways we could do that.”

Overall, Instructional Coach Jess Graham said, there is a lot to be proud of and still work to be done.

“The last indicator we discovered needed some growth was 1.7. When we did that analysis, some of that feedback included concerns about the same people getting recognized over and over again, and there were also some participants who said they felt the recognition focused more on Certified staff members and left out Classified staff,” Graham said. “There were also some participants who indicated the recognition should be more public and shared more. With that in mind, we’re ending our weekly team time meetings with staff shoutouts where a staff member can write someone’s name on a sticky note and shout out about the good work they’ve done – the honoree can be a teacher, a custodian, a cafeteria worker, an administrator, whoever that person thinks is doing a particularly good job at that time. We’re also working on ways to celebrate our interim teachers when they complete their certification, that’s particularly important since they’re working as hard as they are with all of that. We’re also working on figuring out recognitions for our students, and we’ll continue honoring our teacher and student of the month. Some of these are still a work in progress, but we’ll continue working on it and making it work out.”