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.

Southside’s Secret: Teamwork, Tears and Focus

October 2005

Want to move a high poverty school from the academic basement to the penthouse? State principal coach Patricia Redd has two words for you: team effort. Actually, she has two more: frustration and crying.

In the latter half of her 13 years as principal of Dallas County’s Southside Primary School, Redd oversaw an academic transformation that involved all those things. In six years, her school moved from struggling with too many student failures and too few grade-level readers, to a No. 3 ranking among K-2 schools in Alabama in reading performance. But it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t always pretty.

“There was a lot of frustration and a lot of crying, but they are a really hard-working faculty that has always reached higher and higher,” said Redd, who — despite the almost reverential way she is regarded by those inside and outside the school — remains aware that she ruffled feathers during Southside’s climb to the top.

“This was a challenge for (the faculty), and we did have to go through people thinking nothing was ever good enough,” she said.

Redd even got a taste of that herself when, a year or so after Southside became an Alabama Reading Initiative school, system administrators required her to apply for the Alabama Reading First Initiative (ARFI). “I was not happy. I felt like it was an insult. I felt like we had worked so hard, our scores were going up and our children were learning to read. Then they tell me we’re going to write this grant and, if we get it, we’ll be an ARFI school.”

But Redd is quick to say now that the decision was the right one for her students. The school netted thousands of additional dollars, which were used to purchase the highly effective Voyager reading program. The grant also funded more faculty training and access to other resources.

“ARFI helped us grow even more,” Redd said. That willingness to try something new, learn from it and grow is as much a hallmark of the Southside staff as is teamwork, said Redd and Southside reading coach Allison Kelley.

“It has to be a team effort. The reading coach, everybody at that school had to be on the same page, working toward the same goal,” Redd said.

Kelley, who has spent her 16-year career at Southside, agreed. “We all carry each other’s burden. We’re not competing with each other. We are in the process of building readers — as a team,” she said.