TURNING AROUND AN
UNDERPERFORMING SCHOOL
In
this era of greater school accountability, it is important that all schools
increase the performance of their students. The challenges of urban education
are monumental and require a great deal of intervention and collaboration from
the entire community of stakeholders. As we grapple with enhancing student
performance at Homer Street Elementary School ("Homer"), we are
finding success, coupled with challenges that make our jobs so pivotal to this
process.
In an effort to enhance the performance
of our students at Homer, the development of small intensive intervention
groups have been found to be effective in assisting students reach grade level.
However, one of the major challenges that we’ve experienced at Homer was the
loss of one of our intervention teachers due to low enrollment. Through my view
as a building administrator, it is critically important that underperforming
schools receive additional support to effectively address and eradicate the
academic deficits of our students. Moreover, if we are going to battle student
underperformance, it must start in the classroom with interventions that
empower both teachers and students.
Having been an administrator in Florida
and Maryland, I have witnessed how other school districts address student
underperformance. It is imperative that academic and human resources be given
to underperforming schools to turn these schools around. Thus, our present
fiscal situation in the city and state is truly limiting some of the
possibilities of creating this type of reform.
Even in the midst of this phenomenon of
funding loss that many districts are experiencing across the nation, our
educational community must continue to use data to drive the instruction going
on in our classrooms. One of the major on-going positive initiatives in the
Springfield Public School District that has truly enhanced the process of
school improvement is the establishment of principals and teachers reviewing
and analyzing on-going assessment data to improve instruction in the classroom.
The Self-Directed Improvement System
(SDIS) model that our school district has adopted through Step Up Springfield
has provided an excellent framework for school-based staff to effectively
analyze student performance data and provide on-going feedback to teachers in
regard to the performance of students; and the development of strategies to
enhance instruction has truly empowered administrators and teaching in
effectively addressing low student performance.
In addition, last school year Homer
became a part of the federally funded Reading First initiative. This federal
grant was designed to address reading deficiencies of students in grades K-3.
Through this initiative, we are experiencing improvement in the reading scores
of our students in these grades. It is important to note that this program uses
on-going assessments in an effort to periodically monitor the progress of
students.
Although
the challenges that we face are complex, it is imperative that we strive toward
excellence in empowering our faculty and staff to enhance the achievement of
all students through the process of action with reflection on data and the
strategies that we employ in the classroom.
Dr. Michael Henry just entered his second year as the principal at Homer Street Elementary School. He was most recently an assistant principal at Duggan Middle School. n