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Turning Things Around

A rural district in far eastern Oregon builds a new reputation for success.

Story by Bracken Reed
Photos by Darin Oswald

NYSSA, Oregon—Before interviewing for the superintendent position at the Nyssa School District in 2001, Don Grotting did some research. The word on the street—as well as in the data—was not encouraging. “There was a perception that things weren’t working,” says Grotting. “They had a reputation as a chronically low-achieving district.”

According to Geno Bates, the current principal at Nyssa Elementary, that negative perception extended to the town itself and had a long history. “I grew up in a town 12 miles from here,” he says, “and there was always a kind of stigma or negative stereotype about Nyssa.” Most of that reputation was related to Nyssa’s differences—ethnic and economic—from its neighbors. Located on the Oregon-Idaho border, with the Snake River defining both the eastern edge of town and the state line, more than half of Nyssa’s approximately 3,100 residents are Hispanic, a significantly higher percentage than most of the surrounding communities. According to the 2000 U.S. Census nearly a quarter of the town’s population falls beneath the national poverty line.

Traditionally, Nyssa was also a factory town in an area more commonly populated by farmers, ranchers, and small business owners. A giant Amalgamated Sugar Company refinery still looms over the west end of town, and for more than 60 years a majority of Nyssa’s residents worked there, turning sugar beets into White Satin sugar and sending their children to the public schools just up the road.

But, in the late 1990s things began to change. International trade agreements and other realities of the global marketplace sent the refinery into a downward cycle, finally resulting in its closure in January 2006. The Nyssa School District, however, was going in the opposite direction. In March 2005, Oregon Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Castillo honored the district with a Celebrating Student Success award, recognizing Nyssa as one of the most successful districts in the state at closing the achievement gap. In the same school year, the Oregon Department of Education named Nyssa Elementary teacher Steve Wyborney as the Oregon Teacher of the Year.

The word on the street changed dramatically. Almost overnight Nyssa became a model of how a rural school district can find success despite dealing with such challenges as high poverty and a large limited English proficient (LEP) population. Castillo’s award was based primarily on the district’s outstanding achievement on the statewide assessment. In the past three years the district’s scores have been well above the state objective in nearly every subject area and grade level. The third-grade reading scores, for example, have been at or above 92 percent for the past three school years. Eighth-grade reading scores were at 76 percent on the most recent assessment, which is 11 percent higher than the state average.

Castillo’s award focused particular attention on the district’s success with LEP students, and the most recent test results continue to warrant that notice. LEP students met or exceeded the state objective in reading at every grade level tested. The combined reading proficiency score for all LEP students was 74 percent, nearly 25 percent higher than the state average for that subgroup.

These kinds of results have kept visitors coming to the school looking for ideas. Grotting and the building principals are frequently invited to speak at regional and national conferences. Everyone wants to know their secret. The story they have to tell, however, is not one of overnight success, packaged reform models, or specific programs. It’s a story of how staff, students, parents, and community leaders turned their collective focus and talents to the same goal—increasing student achievement—and of the difficult decisions and hard work it took to achieve that goal.

A New Direction

Despite his attempts to deflect it, much of the attention for Nyssa’s success has focused on Superintendent Don Grotting, whose inspiring personal story and straight-talking approach make him a compelling representative for the district. In the early 1990s, Grotting worked in Coquille, Oregon, as a carpenter for the Georgia-Pacific Corporation. As the spotted owl debate raged, and the Pacific Northwest logging industry faltered, Grotting suddenly found himself with no job and few prospects. Many workers felt they had lost not only their jobs but also their identities. Grotting saw it as an opportunity.

Taking advantage of a job retraining program, Grotting first attended Southwest Oregon Community College in nearby Coos Bay and went on to get his B.A. in elementary education from Linfield College. As a teacher, Grotting found he had natural leadership ability. He wasted no time in earning a master’s degree in Educational Administration from Portland State University and then a superintendent license from Lewis & Clark College. In less than eight years, Grotting transformed himself from an unemployed timber worker without a college degree into a sought-after administrator.

While Grotting was working his way toward a superintendent position, Nyssa was struggling. The state had designated both the elementary and middle school as low performing, and the high school was right on the cusp. According to Idalia Stam, the chairperson of the Nyssa School Board, there was a growing sense that it was time to shake things up. Although many positive elements were in place, the district lacked a cohesive, coordinated, and consistent approach. Communication, at all levels, needed to improve. Student achievement, while never an afterthought, needed a deliberate move to the foreground. “Those were our goals,” says Stam. “We wanted to focus on raising academic achievement and we wanted to hire a superintendent with solid communication skills—someone who could communicate with the board, with the building administrators, and with the entire staff. We saw those as connected—good communication was a key to raising student achievement.”

In Grotting, the board found just what it was looking for: a strong leader, willing to make tough decisions, try new ideas, and work to build consensus. His affinity for small-town living and his love of sports and the outdoors also made him a good fit. Not everyone could relate to a relatively isolated, rural, working class community going through hard times. Grotting could. The district offered him the position just before the 2000–2001 school year, and he accepted.

Changing the Culture

“A culture of excuses. Low morale. A little apathetic.” That’s how Nyssa Middle School Principal Jana Iverson describes the district upon Grotting’s arrival. “There was a bit of an attitude among some staff members at the time,” she says. “They had a lot of excuses as to why our kids couldn’t achieve—‘they come from a poor background, their parents don’t speak English, there’s nobody at home to help them’—all those kinds of things.”

Janine Weeks, the elementary school principal at the time of Grotting’s arrival and now the assistant superintendent and curriculum director, agrees. The district had been making gradual improvements, she says, but still struggled with a culture of complacency. “There was just the attitude that ‘30 to 50 percent of our kids are on grade level and that’s the way it is. We can’t do any better. These are the kids we have.’”

One of Grotting’s first actions was to call an all-staff meeting to address that attitude head on. As Iverson remembers it, “He basically said, ‘It’s our expectation that these kids will achieve. This will happen, and there’s no excuse for it not to happen. We will do this, and if you don’t want to do it, maybe you should consider whether you have the commitment that’s necessary for our population to succeed. There are a lot easier places to be a teacher.’”

Iverson laughs when she recalls the meeting. “It was pretty harsh,” she acknowledges, “but for a lot of staff members it was also really refreshing. They wanted to hear that. They were working their tails off, and they were tired of hearing the excuses.”

That desire to change would lead to an important project in Grotting’s first year on the job. Due to the district’s low-performing status, the state had already offered Nyssa various grants. The elementary school, for example, had received a Comprehensive School Reform grant and used it to implement a reform model called Accelerated Schools, which was showing positive results. Now, the state was recruiting willing participants for a High-Performing Learning Communities (HPLC) program.

“The state department called up looking for a volunteer,” Grotting says. “They were going to do a pilot of the program and they wanted to come into the middle school and basically take it apart to find out why it was low performing. It took a lot of trust on the part of the staff to agree to that. You have to be willing to take some criticism.”

Grotting had already made some observations of his own—as well as gathering staff, parent, and school board feedback—and had identified some possible changes. In retrospect, he says, the work of the HPLC team made those changes easier to implement. “They didn’t really make an official recommendation,” he says, “but they expressed some significant concerns about the leadership at some of our schools. It basically validated what we already knew needed to be done.”

The result was a change in leadership at both the middle school and high school. “It had to be done,” Grotting says. “You have to have instructional leaders in all of your buildings. You can try to give them support—whether it’s a teacher or an administrator—but you don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

For Janine Weeks, the issue was one of clear vision and consistent implementation. “You have to have the focus on academics,” she says, “and you have to understand the steps that need to be taken in order to build student academic achievement.”

For example, she says, “The curriculum needs to be aligned with the standards and with what is going to be assessed, and you need to make sure that teachers are actually teaching the curriculum and not just their favorite thing. There are several pieces that are critical for student success that just weren’t consistently in place.”

Opening Doors

Ken Ball, Grotting’s choice to fill the high school principal position, has a unique perspective on Nyssa’s decade of reform. According to Ball, a 28-year veteran in the district, positive elements existed before Grotting’s arrival, including many outstanding staff members. The problem, he says, was that no one had been able to put all those pieces together. “What Don brought was just total leadership,” says Ball. “It’s about attitude and communication and developing trust.”

An example, he says, are the weekly administrative meetings, which were previously limited to principals and central office administrators. Under Grotting’s leadership, the meetings are wide open. Not only are all building principals in attendance, but so are all vice principals, as well as the transportation, maintenance, and food service department managers. Board members and staff members with important issues are always welcome. As a result, says Ball, “Relationships are very strong here. There’s a really high sense of integrity, and with that comes trust. When you have that trust that people are going to shoot straight with you, then you get better performance.”

Geno Bates, who took the reins of the elementary school when Weeks moved to the district office, agrees. “The trust factor is huge,” he says. “If you’ve got a problem or a concern, you know you can call Don. He supports your ideas and he believes in the kids.”

That kind of support makes a culture of high expectations possible, says Weeks. “There are high expectations now, but there’s also support. Don follows up. He visits the classrooms and talks with teachers, and that communicates to them that he cares about what they’re doing. He’s there to support them. And the same thing happens in every department in the school—transportation, food service, maintenance—they’re all committed to helping students achieve, and they all feel supported by their superintendent. He knows what their jobs are, and he’s there for them.”

Spreading the Word

Those new lines of communication don’t end at the edge of campus. Community pride and parental support have always been strong in Nyssa. High school athletics, in particular, have traditionally been a rallying point for the entire community. Fan support is legendary. Despite the long drives required for road games—made worse by the fact that Nyssa is in a different time zone than most Oregon schools—the visiting Nyssa fans frequently outnumber the home team fans by a wide margin. But that kind of support has not always carried over to academics. The district sought to change that by implementing a new mandatory attendance policy for parent-teacher conferences.

A key to the approach, says Grotting, was to extend the “no excuses” philosophy to parent involvement. “We have a poor community,” he says, “but that’s no excuse. Your car broke down? We’ll come get you. You need child care? We’ll provide it. Need a translator? We’ll provide one. You’ve got to work that day? What day can you make it? Can’t make it at all? Well, is there someone who can? An aunt or uncle or grandparent? No? Then we’ll come to you.”

And that’s what they do. Principals and teachers routinely conduct the conferences in students’ homes, if that’s what it takes. The result is that, on average, 98 percent of all parents in the district attend a conference. At the middle school that number is frequently 100 percent.

However it gets done, Grotting says, making that contact with parents is essential. “It’s about saying, ‘This is important. This is your kid’s education. We need your support.’” An added bonus to the middle school conferences, says Stam, is that they’re student-led. “The students tell their parents what they’ve been doing and what they feel they need to improve—that gets them involved in their own improvement. It focuses the accountability on the student. They know they’re supported, but they also know they have to be accountable and responsible.”

According to Weeks, parent participation in the conferences is essential to conveying the importance of education to students. “We want students’ school experience to be recognized as an important part of their lives,” she says. “If they think of home life or their personal life as real and school as something they only do because somebody says they have to then they’re obviously not seeing it as relevant to their lives and their future. It’s up to us—and their parents—to help them see that importance and relevance.”

Building on Success

Much of Nyssa’s success can be attributed to getting these “big picture” policies in place. Strong district guidance, a clear statement of goals and expectations, building-level instructional leadership, improved communication, and parent involvement—all these elements helped build the groundwork for further reforms. As trust developed, administrators at both the buildings and the central office felt empowered to share their ideas and to suggest bold changes.

Two of those changes focused on scheduling. First, the district proposed that the existing block schedule be replaced by a seven-period schedule. “Block scheduling isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” explains Grotting, “but the particular type of scheduling that was in place didn’t provide for the kind of continuity that our population needed.” The district went further, recommending a change to “half-day Fridays,” or a 4 1/2 day week. Students have early dismissal each Friday, which serves two purposes. First, students have one-on-one access to teachers for the first hour of that time. And second, teachers have a set time each week for lesson planning and professional development.

“We weren’t doing everything we should have been, in terms of finding teacher professional development time and also helping students on a more individual basis,” says Grotting. “This met both of those needs.” Communication and trust were again huge factors in getting these changes approved. “We talked to the community,” says Stam, “and some of them were not quite sure. But they trusted the administrators. They believed that they were doing this because it was best for the kids.”

That kind of support has been invaluable in the reform process, according to Grotting. “It allows us to do a little bit of risk taking, in terms of implementing new programs,” he says. “That doesn’t always happen in some school districts. We’ve really concentrated on keeping the board informed and on following through with what we say we’ll do. Once they realized that we had people in place that could implement research and provide effective programs, they’ve really let us do our jobs.”

Looking Toward the Future

After 10 years of steady reform efforts—and six years of Grotting’s leadership—the district finds itself in new territory. Test scores continue to rise in almost all areas, but district leadership remains wary of hitting an achievement plateau. “We have to continue to fine-tune what we’re doing,” says Weeks. “We’ve got to keep doing the good things we’re doing, in terms of meeting the needs of the majority of our students, but we’ve also got to find strategies that are more fine-tuned to individual needs. We don’t want to write any of our students off. We want to reach those last few percent that aren’t succeeding.”

At the elementary school, Bates also sees no letup in his staff. “Even though we’ve had reading scores in the 90 percent range and math scores at 90, I don’t see teachers sitting back and saying, ‘Well, we’re there.’ I just don’t see that. They have a lot of pride in the fact that they’re doing well, and they want to keep it there.”

“And,” Bates wryly adds, “the state department is helping us [stay motivated] by upping the standards.” With the state proficiency marks (or “cut scores”) changing within the coming year, getting all students, in all subgroups, to meet or exceed proficiency will no doubt continue to be a challenge. The difference for Nyssa is that now the school district has the foundation, the leadership, the staff, and the “no excuses” attitude that bode well for the years ahead.

“Ultimately, it’s about believing in people,” Grotting says. “That’s the bottom line. Kids know if you don’t believe in them. And when they feel that you do believe, and that you care about them in and out of the classroom, then they’re going to do their best for you. It makes all the difference.”

By the numbers: Nyssa School District

www.nyssa.k12.or.us