Before 2011 is over, Red Clay Consolidated School District officials will submit their plan to turn around three failing schools in their district.
Those three schools are among the ten in Delaware that have been designated as Partnership Zone (PZ) schools as a part of federal Race to the Top education funding. PZ is a three-year public-private partnership to create measurable, sustainable strategies for turning around low-performing schools. The designated schools are in the state’s bottom 5 percent for performance, the greatest indicator being Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) statistics linked to standardized testing.
In the first round, Glasgow High School, Howard High School of Technology, Stubbs Elementary School in New Castle County and Positive Outcomes Charter School in Kent County were designated as Partnership Zones in August 2010. Through Race to the Top, the schools each will receive $600,000 over three years. In addition, through Title I funding, each school will receive up to $500,000 for three years, depending on how many years it has been under improvement, how many students are in the school, and how much of the population is considered low-income.
Noreen LaSorsa, chief officer of Delaware’s School Turnaround Unit, said the four schools named in the first round, now in the first 100 days of Partnership Zone implementation, are doing as expected with “peaks and valleys;” but each school “understands the focused urgency around student progress and is analyzing and making necessary adjustments as they bubble up.”
While there are four intervention models, the first four PZ schools chose the “transformation” model. In this model, the principal of the building must be replaced and “steps must be taken to increase teacher and school leader effectiveness, institute comprehensive instructional reforms, increase learning time and create a community-oriented school,” according to the Delaware Department of Education.
Transformation is by far the least invasive of the models, which also include closure of the school, restart of the building as a charter school, and “turnaround,” where the principal is replaced along with at least 50 percent of school staff.
According to reports and school board meeting minutes, all of the PZ schools designated in round two in September 2011 have also decided on a transformation model, including Marbrook Elementary School, Stanton Middle School and William C. Lewis Dual Language Elementary School in the Red Clay district.
Red Clay Superintendent of Schools Mervin Daugherty said he welcomes the help in turning around the three schools even if it was a designation that was hard to swallow at first.
“I’m more of a guy with a glass half-full,” Daugherty said. But some staff and parents from the affected schools were disheartened by the news. “We want the best for our children, the best for our staff. What we tried to do was taking away of any negative (connotation of being a designated PZ) through communication.”
Daugherty said he was completely honest with the schools’ communities and in turn he’s had “buy-in” from the “entire populations” of the schools.
“We just wanted to make sure everything was on the table and everything was clear,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of feedback from schools. We believe in everyone being on the same page.”
Part of being on the same page is having everyone understand the challenges facing the PZ schools. Across the board, the designated buildings have a high percentage of students on free or reduced-cost lunch programs. In many, the schools also have high numbers of English Language Learners (ELL) in the student body; at Marbrook and Lewis, more than half of the students are ELL. At all three of the Red Clay PZ schools more than 70 percent of the students come from low-income homes.
“We know one way to improve poverty is through education,” Daugherty said. He added that school challenges include more than just teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. It’s also about making sure students eat breakfast in the morning and are technologically proficient.
Parental engagement part of PZ efforts at Howard
All of the PZ building principals can relate to Daugherty’s challenges, including Tim Capone at Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington. Coming in from Sussex West High School, Capone was ready to take on serious education reform.
Two-thirds of Howard’s inner-city students come from poverty. In 2010, one of every three ninth and tenth grade students was failing math assessments; one of every four was failing English assessments. In short, a culture of defeat permeated the school.
Capone said he knew what to expect when he arrived. “Two-thirds of the students are coming from poverty, it’s the inner city and so you’re looking at a lot of the things people use for excuses in education – they’re all built-in. People get into mindsets and if things aren’t successful, it’s very difficult to take ownership and say, ‘I can do something better, I can do something different to improve.’”
One of the first things Capone discovered when he started as Howard’s principal in February was that the school’s curriculum was simply not in line with the assessment tests, including the Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System. Something so simple was sabotaging student performance. In Spring 2011, staff at Howard started intensive instruction in what hadn’t been covered in the classroom, but would be assessed at the end of the school year. Before PZ funding even came into the building, the school met AYP standards outlined by No Child Left Behind with at least 84 percent of Howard students who were tested meeting or exceeding standards in English Language Arts; 75 percent met or exceeded standards in Math.
“It was kind of a rallying cry for the teachers and they really didn’t know if we were really going to get the results,” Capone said. “That can be daunting, that can be overwhelming. School reform and improving students and making sure they’re learning more, it’s hard work. I can’t emphasize that enough… it’s hard work.”
Howard High School of Technology Principal Tim Capone
Howard High School of Technology Principal Tim Capone
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After receiving a “Superior” rating while still in the school improvement phase of the PZ designation, Capone said staff was energized and encouraged to continue with reforms.
While AYP was mandated through the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation, the Partnership Zone program allows schools at risk to tailor reform plans to their students and community. The bottom line is that PZ may put AYP more within reach than rotating School Improvement Plans have over the last ten years.
“It’s not about the money; it’s about what are you doing to have students perform to the best of their abilities,” Capone said. He said having the PZ designation allowed the school’s turnaround team to write an improvement plan that would specifically help the students at Howard with the unique challenges facing the school, without having to fit into a plan formulated for the whole of Delaware.
Noreen LaSorsa used Capone and the transformation at Howard as one of the examples of the reform PZ schools can experience. She gives a lot of that credit to the committee that designed Howard’s transformation plan.
“With the first four schools, we can’t speak enough about the committees at these schools when it comes to their successes,” LaSorsa said. “When people are volunteering to be part of the design of reform in the schools, you can tell the schools mean so much to them and their community.”
To help those teams, LaSorsa said she and the rest of the Turnaround Unit are “boots on the ground” when it comes to the PZ reform plans. One of her major priorities is to know the plans as well as the district superintendents do.
“We want to be able to answer any question from the Secretary (of Education, Lillian Lowery),” LaSorsa said. “After they submit these plans, staff at the schools still have things they need to do every day. They still have kids in the buildings.”
Daugherty said Red Clay district officials have submitted drafts throughout the planning process and worked with subsequent feedback from the Turnaround Unit, a resource he relished having.
“We’ve worked well with the DOE turnaround office,” he said. “They’ve put a lot of time in. We’ve asked the Department of Education to walk with us and at this point (PZ revisions) are just details and wording. Why write a plan alone when we could have the people who approve and enforce the plan walk with us?”
