To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser

Back to Graphic Version

The Meaning of Progress

An Anchorage school forges strong connections and provides the only stability some students know.

By Bracken Reed
Photos by Jim Lavrakas

Anchorage, Alaska—Step inside a kindergarten classroom at North Star Elementary and the sheer diversity of the students might be the first thing you notice. Even for those used to a multicultural urban environment, North Star is striking in its rainbow of race, language, nationality, and ethnicity. Students have come from all over the globe and from most states in the lower 48. Nearly 90 different languages are represented districtwide, with two dozen at North Star alone. It’s an accurate reflection of the surprising demographics of this urban outpost. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 37 percent of Anchorage’s residents are from an ethnic minority group—second only to Los Angeles among U.S. cities.

Comparison to a city many times its size is unfortunately apt in other ways as well. Despite having fewer than 300,000 residents, Anchorage struggles with the common problems of urban life: Unemployment, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, lack of affordable housing, and racial tensions are all part of the reality here. While not the city’s only defining features—and definitely not what the Chamber of Commerce would like to talk about—the Anchorage School District grapples with these realities and their effects on children every day.

North Star Elementary is at the very epicenter of that struggle. A Pre-K-6 school located in the historically gritty Spenard neighborhood, the school serves two of the city’s three major homeless shelters. Almost one-third of its students are English language learners, and close to 90 percent qualified for free and reduced-price lunch before the school was given full free-lunch service. At one point in the mid-1990s the annual student mobility rate was nearly 90 percent. Students moved through the school so fast that teachers barely had time to learn their names, much less make a meaningful connection with them.

You may not be surprised, then, to hear that the school did not make adequate yearly progress on the state assessment. You might assume that parents, given the option under federal rules, would be eager to send their children to another school across town. But before you jump to conclusions, step back inside that kindergarten classroom. If you look more closely, diversity is not all that will strike you.

First, some of these students don’t seem to be the same age. Second, there are more adults in the classroom than you would normally expect to see. And third, they seem to be collaborating so seamlessly that you cannot tell who is “in charge,” and so effectively that the students, working in small groups, are focused and fully engaged. These are not insignificant details. They are all part of a schoolwide plan that has taken more than 10 years to implement, a plan that was implemented to make sure that no matter what the challenges, no child would pass through the doors of North Star without making a meaningful connection with an adult.

A Window of Opportunity

When current Principal Myrna Moulton arrived in the 1992-1993 school year, North Star was losing the battle. New teachers had to be lured to the school with the promise that it would be a temporary assignment. According to several longtime teachers, the school’s climate was “caustic”: teacher collaboration was minimal, parent involvement was rare, and the “blame game” was running rampant. “Something had to change,” says Moulton. “We were looking for a window of opportunity.”

Ironically, that window opened when the school’s challenge got even steeper. The percentage of students qualifying for Title I free and reduced-price lunch had been rising rapidly for several consecutive years. In the 1994-1995 school year it topped the 50 percent mark and the school qualified for schoolwide Title I status, which meant greater flexibility in how those funds were spent. At the same time, staff turnover at the school and the district office brought a fresh perspective to the Title I program. Administrators encouraged Moulton and her staff to think creatively. “So we did,” says Moulton. “We really decided to think outside the box.”

Moulton formed a staff team and signed them up for a state-sponsored professional development program called Community of Learners. The yearlong program included an intensive needs assessment, which proved to be the catalyst the school had been looking for. It was a step that would take them farther outside the box than they could have imagined.

“We brought in as many different stakeholders as we could for that needs assessment,” says Moulton. “Community members, parents, teachers, students, school board members—you name it. We did a lot of reading, a lot of research. It was extremely informative.”

The invaluable contribution of all stakeholders notwithstanding, the clearest message of the needs assessment came from the regular classroom teachers. “They said, 'Stop the pull-outs!’” says Moulton. “That was definitely the strongest message we heard: 'Let me have my kids, and train me what to do, and I will do it. But I can’t do it when the kids are constantly being pulled out.’”

Closing the Revolving Door

As with most high-poverty, high-minority schools, North Star has a large number of students who fall into instructional subgroups: special education, Title I, migrant education, bilingual education, and Indian education, to name a few. Prior to the needs assessment the school operated entirely on the pull-out model—taking kids out of the regular classroom to provide these specialized services. The result, says special education teacher Debra Benedict, “is that sometimes they would have virtually no kids in their classroom because they were all directed elsewhere. They were finding that they never had any real blocks of teachable time. This group would go and then come back and then this other group would go—nothing was really coordinated.”

The negative effect, says Benedict, was not just instructional. “We were so fragmented that no one spent enough time with any one child to really know them. You would go to a classroom teacher and ask them about a particular student, and they would say, 'Well, I don’t know, because I never see the kid.’”

Moulton heard the message loud and clear. Working with her staff she decided it was time to radically alter not only the classroom schedule but the entire instructional model. Taking full advantage of the flexibility provided by the schoolwide Title I funding, Moulton hired extra Title I staff and reorganized the school’s specialized services into an integrated, “push-in” model. “Basically, we came up with the idea that if we had a special ed teacher or a Title I teacher in every single classroom to help deliver services, then we could lower the pupil-to-teacher ratio and give each grade-level teacher a block of instructional time to really focus in on our core subject areas: reading, writing, and math,” says Moulton. “We could still meet the specialized needs of our students, but we could close that revolving door.”

Changing the Culture

It was harder than it sounds. At first, the special subject-area teachers—including art, music, PE, and library—were not happy. “Traditionally,” says Moulton, “the scheduling in most schools is set up for the convenience of those teachers, so that they can have one grade level at a time. But we decided that we really needed to create the schedule that would allow us to focus on our core subject areas. That had to be our main focus.”

With some delicate negotiating, Moulton and her staff were able to agree on a schedule that worked for everyone. But that was only the first barrier. Putting two teachers together in the same classroom for hour-and-a-half to two-hour blocks proved easier said than done. “What we realized,” says Moulton, “is that people did not know how to work together.” Special ed and Title I teachers, they found, had a fundamentally different approach to instruction. Those differences—combined with the caustic “blame game” environment that had prevailed for several years—were not going to change overnight. Moulton realized that some drastic measures needed to be taken. And that change was going to be a long, gradual process.

The first and most controversial step she took was to bring in an outside mediator. “That was a difficult time,” says special ed teacher Lori Cheek. “We had a person who came in and helped lead staff meetings and worked on that very emotional piece—getting teachers to interact with one another and actually talk to one another for the first time. That met with a lot of resistance. It was not something the staff welcomed.”

But Moulton, with support from the district, continued to push for staff collaboration and open dialogue. She further rearranged the schedule to facilitate weekly planning sessions among the teacher teams. She also attended professional development workshops to improve her own skills—learning valuable lessons about shared responsibility and shared leadership. Slowly, and not without pain, the culture at the school began to change. Collaboration became institutionalized—planning times quickly became “sacred” to the teachers and professional development became a central part of the school philosophy.

Developing Partnerships

By the 1997-1998 school year, many of the initial pieces of the puzzle were in place, but several challenges and several pivotal partnerships still lay ahead. First, the district’s Children in Transition/Homeless project (CIT/H) strengthened its involvement at the school. CIT/H provides services to approximately 1,300 of the 2,500 students in the Anchorage School District, ages one to 18, identified as homeless. For Beth Snyder, the early childhood/ elementary teacher specialist at CIT/H, that means working closely with all 62 elementary schools in the district, but especially with North Star Elementary.

Because of its location, North Star serves more homeless students than any other elementary school in the district. CIT/H runs its own preschool out of North Star—one of three housed at the school as part of a preschool consortium—and maintains a constant presence there. As the mobility rate skyrocketed, Snyder made it her number one priority to keep students at the school.

“So many children start the school year at North Star,” says Snyder, “and it’s my goal to keep them there. I don’t care if they move across town—it’s still usually in their best interest to keep them there, especially if it’s already a few months into the school year. We’ve got kids who may have moved 12 to 14 times in those few months. Maybe they’ve had to double up with family or friends, maybe they’ve had to go to a shelter, then maybe to another shelter, then maybe to a motel for a couple days—I’m trying to keep them at North Star so at least they have that continuity and stability.”

A tireless advocate, Snyder goes to great lengths to establish that stability. To keep students at North Star she works constantly with parents, teachers, school office personnel, Principal Moulton, shelter directors, district administrators, school board members, other social service organizations, and city hall. And it has worked.

With Snyder’s support, North Star has been able to cut its mobility rate almost in half, and the ripples have been felt throughout the school. Teachers get to know the students better, parents become more comfortable with school personnel, and students get the benefit of more meaningful connections with their teachers and classmates. The longer the student stays, the better the service the school can provide and the deeper the connections they can make.

Another key partnership for the school has been its five-year contract with the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL), which began in 2000. NWREL has provided professional development focused on helping North Star become a high- performing learning community. According to Moulton, prior to this time staff development had been generic and district-driven. Teachers had little say in their own training. The partnership with NWREL has been different. Moulton and her staff have requested specific, school-based training that meets immediate needs. This has included help in revising the school vision statement, strengthening teacher collaboration, and building family and community partnerships. It has also included more direct, instructional-based training in areas such as 6+1 Trait® Writing, math problem solving, and using the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol model to deliver content to English language learners.

Along with increased involvement of CIT/H and partnership with NWREL, another change to North Star’s instructional model has had a profound impact. As staff became comfortable with team teaching and collaboration, the idea of multiage classrooms took hold. The school experimented with several configurations and eventually settled on three: a K-1, a 2-3, and a 4-5, each of which is co-taught by two certified, full-time teachers. In addition to these three classrooms, each grade level also has at least one traditional classroom, taught by a single teacher. This dual approach allows for maximum flexibility in meeting the diverse needs of both students and staff.

Traditional and multiage classrooms receive the same support: a one-and-a-half-hour block during which at least one special ed or Title I teacher is present. Bilingual education specialists also provide support to regular classrooms in the afternoon, while spending mornings in the language lab working with students in the earliest stages of English acquisition.

While both approaches have their virtues, the multiage program has one benefit that has been especially powerful: Students that stay at the school have the same set of teachers two years in a row. The human connections that are made between the staff and these students—especially those who continue to have a troubled family life—can have a measurable impact not just on the students’ test scores, but on the entire course of their lives.

Looking Ahead

North Star Elementary has made tremendous gains since the days of acrimonious infighting, high mobility rates, and a revolving door instructional model. They have been named a Distinguished Title I School. Their students’ test scores have risen steadily. They have created a schoolwide culture of collaboration and developed a shared vision that is student-centered. They have maximized resources and created a sustainable, integrated instructional model. They have truly become a community of learners. And most important, they have changed from a school in which many students slipped through the cracks to one in which several caring adults are interacting closely with each student, every day. In short, they have made the kind of progress that truly matters.