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Starting From Where You Are

Riverside Middle School yearns to be measured by its accomplishments in boosting achievement, notably among its Native American students.

Story and photos by Bracken Reed

Billings, Montana—Every town has it: the “wrong side of the tracks,” the part of town where the “poor people” live. If you grew up on that side of the tracks you know how those labels can bite, and how the realities of life there can tear at a child’s self-confidence. But there are other sides to that life you may also know: the ironic humor that’s often mistaken for cynicism; the wordplay that mangles grammar but somehow hits the nail exactly on the head; the do-it-yourself resourcefulness; the working class pride and fierce family loyalty; the refusal to cave in under immense challenges. Take even a short walk through the hallways of Riverside Middle School and you will see examples of all these qualities and more.

In Billings, the Montana Rail Link tracks form both a symbolic and a literal divide for south-side residents. North of the tracks lies the historic downtown with the wide-open streets and mishmash of old and new buildings typical of Western towns originally based on railroads, cattle, and grain. Far to the north, into the hills, are the large, new homes and tidy lawns of the more affluent. But south of downtown is a different story. Here you will find the Montana Women’s Prison, the Conoco oil refinery, the Western Sugar Cooperative, and the homeless shelter and food bank. Convenience stores, gas stations, and bars crammed with video poker machines are scattered along the main streets, while most of the side streets are full of potholes and lined with small, WWII-era houses. Many have peeling paint, maybe a porch falling to one side, blankets hanging in the windows, lawns gone to dirt. Down one of these side streets, across from a small house with livestock in the yard, you will find Riverside Middle School.

A Challenging Environment

A 7-8 middle school, Riverside serves not only the rough south side, but a large portion of students bused in from the west side, where urban sprawl has shifted the center of the city’s population. Students come to Riverside from 16 different feeder schools—more than any other school in the district. Of its nearly 600 students, more than half receive Title I free and reduced-price lunch.

The school is also one of the most diverse in the district. Due east, across the flat, treeless prairie, is the Crow Indian Reservation, one of the largest in the state. Adjacent to the Crow Reservation is the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. As the medical, financial, and educational center of eastern Montana, Billings exerts the usual pull of a big city. Many tribal members come to Billings looking for opportunities, and many find them. But some find only dead-end jobs, rundown rentals, and a cycle of poverty that keeps them moving back and forth between the city and the reservation at regular intervals.

The numbers at Riverside reflect these realities. Nineteen percent of the students— or nearly one in five—are of Native American heritage. The mobility rate—which is by no means limited to the Native American population—hovers near 50 percent in most school years. Teachers and administrators alike list the high mobility rate as possibly the biggest challenge they face.

Riverside is also the only middle school in the district with an English language learners (ELL) program. One certified ELL teacher and one paraprofessional serve at the school for three class periods a day, spending the rest of the day at Billings Senior High. Any seventh- or eighth-grade student in the district needing ELL instruction is sent to Riverside, no matter where they live.

Other challenges at Riverside are familiar to many schools serving a low-income population: a large number of special education students, a struggle with student motivation and parent involvement issues, and a lack of necessary resources and facilities.

For Principal Mike Smith, there is a big difference between acknowledging these challenges and dwelling on them. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 34 years in public education,” says Smith, “it’s that there are some things you can change and some that you can’t. And the social-economic situation or the home conditions that kids come from are things we cannot change. We try to focus on the things we can change, like making the experience here at school a positive one.”

Making a Difference

Focusing on the positive is a defining feature at Riverside, but it has its limits. Ask the staff to share their feelings about accountability and adequate yearly progress (AYP), for instance, and the gloves come off. In the 2003-2004 school year, Riverside did not meet AYP. Or, as the Billings Gazette trumpeted soon after the test results were released: “Billings Schools Fail Progress Review.” For many at the school the results—both how they are measured and the public perception of them—are a source of deep frustration and wounded pride.

Two subgroups at Riverside scored below the “magic number” for making AYP: Native American students and Title I free and reduced-price lunch students. In both categories the school made AYP in math, but fell just short in reading. The only other school in the district that failed to make AYP was Riverside’s main feeder high school, Billings Senior High.

Riverside staff members are not prone to complaining. They do not make excuses. As a whole, they are a veteran crew—a large percentage has been at the school for 20 years or more—that has willingly chosen to work at one of the most challenging schools in the district. They are proud of their work, and embrace accountability as a central part of their philosophy. But, for many, there is a clear distinction between accountability and the current AYP system.

“I personally feel that accountability is a very positive thing,” says math teacher Kathy Tucker. “I believe in being accountable, absolutely. But AYP is something different.”

The problem, according to Tucker and many of her colleagues, is that true progress, student-by-student, is not what is measured by AYP. “We take students from where we get them,” says Tucker, “and that is not always at grade level. And while we’re very good at trying to get them up to grade level—in fact, I think that’s our expertise here at Riverside—it’s not always going to happen.”

Principal Smith agrees. “This staff is just wonderful at taking kids from wherever they are and working with them and seeing what difference we can make. And we do make a difference. And that’s what we would like to have used as a measure [of AYP] is how much progress a student has made from one year to the next.”

Further muddying the picture, says Smith, is the fact that the school is effectively penalized for its diversity. In Montana, 40 students are required for a subgroup to be included in AYP testing. What that means, realistically, is that those schools with a high number of subgroups (meaning: a lot of diversity) will end up being tested in multiple areas, while a school just up the road—or up the hill—may not be. In fact, a given student’s test scores may be included in multiple subgroups, such as Title I, special education, and Indian education. As Smith see it, “The more subgroups you have tested, the higher your chances are of failing to make AYP, because if even one subgroup fails, the whole school is seen as failing. In our eyes, that’s simply not a level playing field.”

The greatest irony, says Smith, is that the eighth-grade Native American students at Riverside, while failing to make AYP in reading, outperformed every other peer subgroup in the state. “If anything,” says Smith, “maybe the state should be looking at what we’re doing instead of saying ‘you didn’t make AYP’. We must be doing something right.”

In fact, Riverside is doing many things right. And their effort to raise the achievement of Native American students is a prime example. The school supports a full-time Indian education tutor and has worked intensively to build cultural awareness. For example, the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) has provided extensive staff development in the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model. SIOP focuses on delivering high-quality content-area curriculum while still meeting the needs of English language learners. “The SIOP training has made us much more aware of how to design lesson plans that meet the needs of all our students, not just a few,” says Smith. “It’s helped us with our ELL students, of course, but it’s also helped us with our Native American students. We’re much more aware of the different cultures within our school, and a lot of that has come from the training we’ve received and the partnership grant we’ve had with NWREL.”

The school has also turned up the heat on its reading instruction, implementing a model in which any student scoring under the 40th percentile is automatically assigned to a reading class as one of their electives. Students scoring under the 27th percentile are placed in an even longer and more intensive reading-language block. This is just one example, Smith says, of how the pressures of AYP and other elements of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act have been turned into a positive at the school.

“There’s the old saying: Don’t teach to the test,” Smith observes, “but, you know, if you’re not teaching to what you’re testing then what are you teaching to? One thing I can say is that NCLB has made us much more aware of what we’re doing in the classroom and much more aware of how our students are performing. And that can only be a good thing.”

Smith, who is retiring at the end of the year, is proud of how far his school has come, AYP or no AYP, and is clear about where Riverside stands on accountability. “I don’t think we have ever questioned that we are accountable,” he says. “That’s never been an issue for us. We look forward to letting parents and the public know what we’re doing here.”

In this, Smith represents both the school and the south-side community. “We start from where we are” is the attitude here. These are people who deal with the cards they’re dealt. They never give up.