Beginning the Turnaround | Professional Development

Beginning the Turnaround: 'No Less than Five Years'

Principal Dawn Smith's leadership has been central to the school's remarkable turnaround. "I had a mission," she says. "I knew the kids and the community, and I knew what the school could be."

In the summer of 1993 Smith launched into the most serious problem facing the school: recruitment and retention of staff. She let candidates applying for teaching jobs know that if they wanted to work at Warm Springs, they needed to make a commitment of five years. That eliminated a lot of applicants, she says, but it inspired others to rise to the challenge.

"My first year as principal I hired 16 new staff members," Smith recalls. "By then I knew I needed people who were committed to teaching every single kid in the school. Most of those who applied had good skills, but beyond that we were looking for teachers with good hearts, those who had a mission and who had the courage to stick it out. That's what we looked for from then on, and that's what we got."

Cary Varela was one of those who showed up for an interview that year. "I was recently divorced, raising a daughter alone, and looking for a place to put down roots. Dawn asked me to commit to five years. She said she was looking for someone who was going to make a difference." Varela adds, "I feel I have found a community here. I have no intention of leaving." Not that the work is easy. "As a bank teller I used to think that getting held up at gunpoint was hard, but this is harder!" she says. "It's the hardest job I've had, but it's also the most rewarding."

As Varela talks, her second-graders have gone home for the day and she is waiting for an ex-student, now a sixth-grader, to come in for a tutoring session. She ran into him at the Safeway in Madras the other day, she says, and "when he said he was having trouble in school, I told him to come see me. I feel responsible."

Six years later, nearly half of those teachers hired in 1993 are still at Warm Springs, and turnover of staff hired since then has slowed to a trickle. "The teachers that Dawn recruited have stayed because of her ability to retain them," says Keith Johnson, Assistant Superintendent of Jefferson County School District, "and because they are a unique bunch of young people. The sense of community among her staff is really rare, and nice when you can get it."

The first challenge facing Smith and her team was to gain control of student behavior. "We came up with behavioral guidelines for every area of the school," says Smith, "and we wrote them down: 'This is what it looks like when students are in the hallways; this is what assembly behavior looks like; this is what a classroom should look like when the teacher is doing direct instruction.' And then we agreed on how we were going to teach those behaviors to the children."

Slowly, change began to happen. The graffiti disappeared, the daily trashing of the bathrooms stopped, students began to walk quietly in the hallways, and they learned to pay attention when a teacher was talking. "No principal before Dawn was able to get control of the kids' behavior," recalls Johnson. Today the school appears to a visitor as a model of decorum as nearly 400 youngsters move between several buildings through the rhythm of a crowded school day.

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