MAKING THE GRADE: SCHOOLS & POVERTY

About the Series: Alabama’s slowly but steadily rising student poverty rate is a daunting issue. In this series devoted to the challenges of helping high-poverty schools become high achieving schools, ASB reports on what school boards must know and do to help low income students get a quality education. Each installment profiles high-poverty/high-performing schools to offer insight and inspiration.

Slow & Steady: Southside Primary Changes
Net Huge Improvement

By Susan Rountree Salter
October 2005

“To have played a part in someone's life that could have been written off. We don't do that. We can’t.” – Allison Kelley, reading coach

Sometimes change comes in one of those “eureka!” moments, a flash of insight that makes clear the path you should take.

And sometimes it doesn’t.

Take Dallas County’s Southside Primary School. Located just east of Selma, Southside is separated from U.S. Highway 80 by well-used railroad tracks. Once home to hundreds of students from military families stationed at the nearby air force base, its population underwent a dramatic shift after the federal government closed the base in 1977.

Since then, it has drawn the bulk of its students, 97 percent of whom live at or below the poverty level, from a housing project and small homes in the immediate area as well as from rural east Dallas County.

By 1999, the school was, for all intents and purposes, just another high poverty, low achieving school where instructional programs weren’t working. Despite a stable, well qualified and aggressive faculty, too many students were failing to learn to read, too many were repeating grades, and too many were performing below grade level long after leaving Southside.

But after six years of what one faculty member calls “baby steps” and an all-consuming focus on reading, Southside now ranks third among Alabama’s K-2 schools in reading, and virtually all its kindergartners and first-graders are performing on grade level.

“I knew in November of 2000 that we were on the right track to teaching our children to read. That’s when I saw the children in kindergarten beginning to pick up books and trying to read,” said Patricia Redd, who shepherded Southside through the changes as principal and now works as a regional principal coach for the Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI). “(But) we went about it in very small steps.”

In the Beginning

The school’s first small step was made with Allison Kelley, then a first-grade teacher at Southside, and Kim Porter, her team teacher. Both had what Kelley calls a “burning desire” to help children learn to read, and they couldn’t understand why that wasn’t happening. They and their peers were working hard and had embraced new teaching techniques, including small group instruction and team teaching. But achievement was still lackluster.

Today, Kelley and Redd lay much of the blame for that on the school’s old basal reader. Used at Southside for more than 15 years, it lacked systematic phonics instruction and was ineffective in a school where most students start kindergarten with the vocabulary of a 3-year-old.

“Sometimes I think these children are spoken to (at home) and not spoken with necessarily,” Kelley said of students’ home lives. “So their oral communication skills aren’t as developed maybe as a child who comes from a home where they are spoken with and conversation is occurring. All that affects vocabulary and eventually comprehension.”

But in the late 1990s, Kelley connected with a college professor who was working with the school, and the professor launched her and the faculty on a quest to better understand the mechanics reading instruction. “We started reading professional materials and realized that there were other ways maybe to meet these children’s needs,” said Kelley, now Southside’s reading coach.

That change also moved the faculty to work together more as a team. “We had the same goal in mind: to make sure every child learned to read and read on grade level,” Redd said.

Thus, when the Dallas County superintendent and school board decided to make all their schools Alabama Reading Initiative sites, Southside’s faculty was ready. The requisite 100 percent faculty buy-in wasn’t even an issue, Kelley said.

But the new things they learned and their implications for the instructional program were daunting. So, instead of trying to implement everything the following fall, Redd asked faculty members to identify one thing they were going to implement and one they wanted to know more about.

“That was a way I saw to narrow down what they had been exposed to. I was just as overwhelmed as my teachers were. So, we just took it one step at a time,” Redd said.

Over time, the school received a federal Reading Excellence grant to purchase a phonics program, fully implemented ARI and then the Alabama Reading First Initiative and purchased the tightly scripted Voyager reading program for K-1 and a separate reading program for second-graders.

Targeted Help

With the new programs, reading instruction clearly is Job 1; other subjects and activities take a backseat. In the school office, for example, a large pink sign proclaims the “protected reading time” for each grade level (8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. for kindergarten; 8:15 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. for first-grade; and 10 a.m. to noon for second-grade) and notes, “No interruptions can be made to classes at these times.”

Throughout the school year, struggling readers and those at risk of becoming strugglers are identified and targeted for special assistance. Depending on their needs, they receive intervention anywhere from twice to four times a day, said Principal Melanie Wright, now in her second year at Southside. Those classified as needing “intensive” help receive reading instruction a minimum of three times a day.

“When I first came here, I had not a clue. I found the whole set up is different. They’re getting hit double, triple, quadruple times. So it’s basically reading all day long,” she said.

Among the interventions: Any of the school’s four lab teachers work with them during the day; and in kindergarten and first-grade, the classroom teachers and intervention teachers also provide targeted assistance beyond the regular program, Wright said.

Teaching the Teachers

Just as important as what the students are learning is what — and how — Southside’s teachers have learned over the last five years. Gone, said Kelley, are the days when professional development was unfocused and loaded with cute ideas teachers might or might not implement. Through ARI, the Reading First Initiative and even the Voyager program, training is program-and/or data-driven.

“Our professional development is more focused on what we see as a weakness that we need to change within ourselves in order to change students,” Kelley said.

The training from the various programs has taught the staff how to do the work, how to adjust their teaching for small group instruction, how to modify their teaching plans when needed and how to meet individual students’ needs, she said. With Voyager, teachers also have learned the “whys” behind the instructional methods, including why it is critical to teach students following the highly detailed script, Kelley said.

The training also continues in monthly “pod” meetings, grade level meetings focused entirely on reading performance, during which Kelley addresses whatever topics the data indicate teachers need to work on. During the meetings, teachers review each student’s performance, which is monitored weekly, biweekly or monthly depending on the student’s skill level.

“We go around the table and each teacher shares. The glory and the beauty of this has been that, five years ago, they would have said, ‘Yes, this student’s behind; so-and-so’s not going to make it.’ Now it’s, ‘Jack isn’t going to make it, Ms. Kelley, because he still doesn’t have his vowel sounds.’ They’re much more diagnostic now than they’ve ever been before,” Kelley said.

In short, the meetings are designed to ensure teachers reflect on their teaching strategies, consider what is working and what isn’t, and decide how to proceed, she said.

In addition, the school has “walk throughs” where Kelley and the principal observe teacher performance and provide feedback.

Struggling teachers then are invited to watch one of their Southside peers, whose skills are strong in that particular area, teach a model lesson.

“You just have to take baby steps, and you move slowly. You pick out what’s important, and you work on that,” Kelley said.

Another key component is the school’s commitment to doing most of the professional development during the work day, even if that means hiring a substitute to cover a teacher’s class, she said.

“I want them to leave here each day leaving here. Sure, there are times you need to stay, but they’re giving their hardest for the first seven hours,” she said.

Sustaining the Push

But even with most of the training built into the workday, working at Southside or any of Alabama’s other high poverty, high achieving schools can take a toll on teachers, who are under the gun daily to move students forward. “They’re dead tired when they leave. We all are,” Wright said. “But that’s part of it.”

And some of the most intense pressure comes not from Wright, but from each other.

“You need to be here for the right reasons, and if you’re not, then you need to think about going somewhere else,” Kelley said. “You won’t survive here, I don’t think. Your peers will push you to improve - that’s just the atmosphere here.”

To ward off burnout and lower stress levels, Wright said she makes recognition and motivation priorities. Last year, her first at Southside, Wright made goody bags for each teacher, complete with notepads, folders, mouse pads, pens and markers. She also tries to give her staff a duty-free lunch periodically and has been known to order pizzas for them. She also convinced the system’s Title I supervisor to fund a new computer, scanner and tabletop copier for every teacher.

“I do whatever I have to do for them because they are the ones in the trenches,” Wright said.

Big Payoff

The benefits of Southside’s all-or-nothing approach are hard to argue with:

• At the end of the 2003 school year, 62 percent of Southside’s kindergartners had mastered the skill of breaking down the sounds of words (a precursor to reading), according to the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). By last spring, that had jumped to 99 percent. Those same tests showed 16 percent were “deficit” at the skill in 2003, but by 2005, no student was deficient at it.
• At the end of 2003, DIBELS showed 84 percent of Southside’s first-graders were at grade level on the ability to decode and blend words, also a precursor to reading. By late 2005, every first-grader was scoring at grade level on that skill.
• Three years ago, only 49 percent of Southside’s second-graders could read 90 words per minute. By the end of the 2005 school year, 77 percent could.

But for Kelley, there is immediate gratification in seeing a student benchmark, especially a special education student. “To have played a part in someone’s life that could have been written off. We don’t do that. We can’t. They have to make progress too. When they make benchmark, that’s a celebration. It’s awesome,” she said.

But Kelley acknowledges that some Southside students are benchmarking only after incredible levels of intervention, and sustaining that performance after they leave the school can be a challenge. “If you just treat those children like benchmarked students, they may not make those gains for you.”