Northwest Education

Winter 2007 / Volume 12, Number 2.

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Improving on Culture

A Washington school district exits the “improvement” list with a new outlook

Story by Rhonda Barton
Photos by JEAN BOYLE, Suzie Butler

PORT ORCHARD, Washington—In 2004, South Kitsap administrators got the bad news: For the second year in a row, the district didn’t make enough progress on seventh-grade special education students’ reading and math scores.

That threw the 11,000-student district into Step 2 “Improvement” status. In Washington, such a designation means that the school district is required to work with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to improve results or face increasingly stiff sanctions.

Today—after a lot of planning, hard work, and an infusion of OSPI resources—the district has shed its “needs improvement” label. In reaching that point, South Kitsap realized that simply improving some students’ performance wasn’t good enough: It needed a sea change in district culture that would benefit all students.

Lessons Learned

Port Orchard—the home of South Kitsap School District—is a community in the beginning stages of transition. The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard dominates the waterfront along Sinclair Inlet, which forms the western tip of the Sound. While the Navy and defense contractors remain the top employers, more and more people are using Port Orchard as a bedroom community. A commute of two hours each way to Seattle is not that unusual anymore.

The district’s 16 schools serve a student population with a 29 percent poverty rate, though some schools have free and reduced-price lunch rates that exceed 40 percent. The number of special education students can reach almost 15 percent in any given year.

Assistant Superintendent Kurt Wagner admits that the district isn’t without its challenges. He observes, “We struggle like anyone else.” But, the struggle to climb out of improvement status has left enduring lessons that other districts might heed. Wagner ticks off some of those epiphanies:

• You need a dedicated AYP planning committee that digs into data and involves all principals in the role of instructional leaders.
• You need to identify the best instructional practices to affect all kids, relying on research and the experience of your best teachers when making curricular choices.
• You need well-designed, job-embedded professional development that’s focused on supporting teachers’ efforts to implement those best instructional practices.
• You need a collaborative team—including special education, Title I, instructional specialists, and literacy and math coaches—to work with classroom teachers on a plan of attack for each struggling student and to meet the needs of all students.
• You need a strong partnership with your unions.
• You need to talk with staff about the belief that “all kids can learn” and identify the barriers to accomplishing that goal.

Changing Perceptions

The last lesson may have been the most revealing and potentially troublesome. As Linda Munson, South Kitsap’s director of special programs and head of the AYP planning committee, recalls, “It was clear early on that we had to address our culture. We had come to realize that not all teachers believed all students could learn.”

Working with the Center for Educational Effectiveness, a school improvement organization based in Redmond, Washington, the district surveyed staff, parents, and students to uncover attitudes and perceptions about school culture and organizational effectiveness. In examining the results, the AYP committee discovered that a significant percentage of staff members was not convinced that all students could meet Washington’s rigorous achievement standards in reading and math.

As its first priority, the group engaged all staff members in deep conversation about that belief and provided data to challenge assumptions. They talked about using alternatives such as portfolios to meet standards. And, they reframed the discussion so it became more personal and focused on success.

“Instead of asking about meeting standards, you have to ask teachers if they believe all kids can learn. If they don’t, then you say, ‘Tell me the percentage that you think can’t’ and you ask them to name those students,” says Wagner. “At that point, when they attach those statements to their own kids, it’s difficult for them to turn away.”

One tool the district has used to make the conversation less abstract and more student-centered is a “literacy tracking wall” in all elementary schools. At East Port Orchard Elementary, it actually covers two whole walls in the literacy resource room. Three-inch square “sticky” notes, each bearing a child’s name, are color-coded by grade levels and arranged in a continuum according to the student’s scores on fluency and ability to read complex text independently. The graphic system makes it easy to spot a fourth-grader, denoted by a yellow square, stuck in the midst of a sea of pink second-grade squares.

Teachers come in on a regular basis, examine the wall, and talk to the literacy coach and instructional specialist about how to literally and figuratively move their students along the scale. “It helps in pinpointing the skill deficits and identifying the intervention that needs to be put in place—from small-group instruction to working with the child individually,” says Wagner. He adds that the tracking wall also aids in program evaluation: For example, if too many students are having problems with fluency, it means that teachers need more training in that area.

The formation of collaborative “child study teams” has also helped match struggling students with the most effective instruction. Each school has a problem-solving team made up of the principal, teachers, literacy coach, special education specialist, and psychologist. Teachers will bring concerns about their individual students to the group for guidance. Munson notes, “Typically, the process was used to decide which kids to test for special education. Now, we’re asking teachers to identify the deficits and exhaust the interventions first so special ed testing becomes a last resort instead of the first.” The district believes that approach is at least partially responsible for reducing the number of youngsters now identified as special education from nearly 15 percent to a little over 12 percent of the student population.

 

Tapping Into State Resources

These steps, along with robust professional development, bring praise from Bill Rossman, the district improvement assistance coordinator at OSPI. He admits that it’s difficult to pinpoint the key component that can turn around a district when there are many different strategies in the mix. However, he credits South Kitsap’s large and hardworking AYP planning committee with playing a critical role.

“One of the things that was amazingly significant was the size of their team—more than 80 members, including parents—and how many people they brought to the table for conversation,” says Rossman. “That led to a serious look at data and analyzing what students needed. They kept looking deeper into the data and found ways they could approach staff, parents, and students themselves about how they were going to proceed with their improvement plan.”

Rossman says bringing in outsiders to help look at the data and “ask the difficult questions” was important. He points out that “someone from outside doesn’t have ownership nor are they perceived as having a particular approach that an insider might take exception to.”

An 82-member team may sound unwieldy, but South Kitsap was able to manage the process under the direction of a four-member steering committee (made up of Superintendent Bev Cheney, Special Education Director Rita Reandeau, School Improvement Consultant Jim Whitford, and Munson)—all of whom also served on a slightly larger planning team. While the entire AYP group worked together, members broke into smaller groups to process information along grade-level, cross-level, and school-based lines.

Rossman thinks having a large committee ensures that there’s greater awareness of the issues and brings more ownership across the district. “The planning team obviously took information from the larger group and strategized on how to implement their recommendations, shift focus, provide needed professional development, and allocate budget dollars.”

Washington’s district improvement program has been able to provide more financial resources to districts like South Kitsap, thanks to a $2 million, two-year appropriation from the state legislature that was matched by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The funds are in addition to $7 million that Washington annually earmarks for school and district improvement.

This year, much of the improvement money will go for beefed-up technical assistance to 30 districts in need of improvement. Of those 30, five districts were selected for more intensive help, including additional professional development, an on-site review by peer educators, and the services of a facilitator for 80 days during a two-year period.

In the 2004 and 2005 school years, South Kitsap received $35,000 a year from the state’s district improvement program. The district used the money, along with a 10 percent set-aside in Title I funds, to cover the AYP committee members’ participation in after-school meetings. The extra dollars also financed materials and services of consultants like the Center for Educational Effectiveness.

More than money, though, South Kitsap relied on the research and advice that OSPI and the Washington Association of School Administrators (WASA) made available during the improvement process. “Both WASA and OSPI were at our beck and call,” says Wagner. The two organizations put on a series of conferences featuring noted researcher Michael Fullan that were particularly useful in working to reshape the district’s culture.

“As Fullan says, you have to change behaviors before beliefs change,” Munson points out. In the end, changing behaviors and beliefs has been at the crux of making improvements for all South Kitsap’s students.

By the numbers: South Kitsap School District

Total students	10,764
Racial/ethnic makeup:
White	81.8%
African American	3.3%
Hispanic	3.7%
American Indian/Alaska Native	2.6%
Asian	7.2%
Free and reduced-price lunch	28.7%
Special education	17%
Staff:
Teachers	27
Support staff, including counselors	141
Administrators	36
Spending per student	$7,392

For more information: www.skitsap.wednet.edu