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The New Reality For Grand Rapids Public Schools

Posted on 20. Apr, 2010 by Patrick Revere in Academics, News

Grand Rapids Public Schools is redefining its sense of austerity, and more than anything the district wants to share its new view with the community.

And it’s imperative they succeed.

Superintendent Bernard Taylor said in last month’s “State of Our Schools” address, the community and school system, hand in hand, will either fall in vain or fly together. The 100-year-old approach to educating children is shattered, he said, yet GRPS is positioned to serve as a model for feeding the way young minds work today; with technology, with corporate and community collaboration, with flexibility.

Dr. Taylor believes, that a disciplined approach to these ideals will fly, and with impressive results.

“It’s a matter of the collective will driving what we do,” Superintendent Taylor said. “Because if it’s not that, we don’t know what it will be, and that’s dangerous.

“We know that what we’ve done in the elementary and middle schools has worked, and now it’s a matter of getting these same ideas to stick some way in the high schools,” Dr. Taylor said. “There is no sure fire way to get this done, but what I believe will work is if we can create environments that are of obvious, immediate value in the relationships between teachers and students.”

While many districts have been waiting, wading through chaos caused by the millions of dollars in depleted funding, Grand Rapids Public Schools continues to move steadily forward in anticipation of hitting its stride.

In many cases, the progress is marked by changes that help repair those classroom relationships.

Robert Evans, principal of Burton Middle

Robert Evans is the principal at Burton Middle School, near the intersection of Buchanan Avenue and Burton Street SW. He was assistant principal at the middle school in the late 1990s, part of the building’s troubled past that included three years on the federal Annual Yearly Progress warning list. Approached by district administrators to lead the building, he embarked on solutions to the ailing school’s problems.

“The building’s students were stymied academically and socially,” Mr. Evans said. “Burton Middle was not taken seriously in the way of instruction by the public or the district.”

The state assigned curriculum coaches to observe, analyze and recommend procedural changes. When ideas for change were suggested, the staff seemed uninterested, the principal said.

In response, the school was “reconstituted.”

“That means we fired everyone and made people re-apply for their jobs, or any job, if they were up for it,” Mr. Evans said. “There was hysteria, as one could imagine. We ended up turning over about 80 percent of the staff.

“But the group that came back was truly energetic with devotion,” he said.

Members for an Instructional Leadership Team were plucked from the new staff. The team looked over Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) data, determined the learning materials/supplies that were needed, and created a strategic process for a new, more focused curriculum.

It was apparent the students at Burton needed to improve in the areas of reading comprehension, language arts and mathematics. Though scores were low in all areas, Evans and his staff agreed to focus on the core, knowing that progress in the center would cause a ripple effect to the fringes.

“Our data showed that math students were having a lot of difficulty working with decimals,” Mr. Evans said. “We attacked that part of the curriculum with an open door policy, meaning that added tutoring was made available, and that classroom doors would not be closed so that we could oversee that our focus was remaining intact.”

When the objectives were in place, Principal Evans and his team went to the students.

“We told them that it wasn’t just their teachers who had work to do,” he said. “They took that to heart, we created a whole new learning climate, and it stuck.”

Students at the school immediately made Annual Yearly Progress, and Burton Middle School dropped from the federal government’s warning list.

Principal Evans points to his teachers and students, and says “Burton is not the school it once was. It’s a whole new school.”

This new austerity is evident throughout the school, among the teachers and students.

In an English class, Ms. Mary Stoddard helps the students analyze a poem.

“Look at the stanza that tells us whether she’s ready to go or not,” Ms. Stoddard says. “Let’s give a minute for everyone to catch up and look for some evidence in there that will answer our questions.”

Down the hall, 27 students are quiet and keyed into laptops as they review Web-loaded wind charts for their Earth Science course.

Art teacher Mary Lamson-Burk teaches studio art, but also floats between core classes that use an integration philosophy to detail how art can be used to bolster learning in seemingly unrelated areas – this year “art integration” projects focus on social studies.

“They’re studying ancient Greece,” Ms. Lamson-Burk said. “So we had them create a façade that resembles the Parthenon and add works of art that represent important portions of their daily lives. It helps tell the story of the Parthenon, and what it meant to the Greeks who built it.”

At Harrison Park Middle School, near Alpine Avenue and Richmond Street, Principal Mike Nassar wears a wide smile.

“This is some of the best news we’ve received to date, I think,” Mr. Nassar says.

In March, the students and teachers at Harrison Park were recognized for their good work. They were given a Meijer Good School award, which comes with a $25,000 grant that can double and triple in years to come if goals continue to be met.

“I’m proud of the fact that we went from being on a district watch list to being an aspiring school,” the principal said.

Aspiring schools, whether deemed as such by the Meijer grant program or not, can be found district wide.

Four years ago, GRPS, the third largest school district in Michigan, was near the bottom of every performance list among the state’s urban districts. In 2006, only 26 of 55 GRPS schools made Annual Yearly Progress, and just seven of 55 earned a B grade or better in state reports.

Today, 45 of 55 schools have met AYP and continue to leap up lists in a variety of subjects. The number of schools earning a B grade or better has tripled in that time, to 21.

These are results taken to heart by student Anjelica Saldana.

She spoke on behalf of her fellow students at the mid-March schools address. Anjelica, a freshman at Union Academy for Design and Construction, said today’s common perception of the district as “failing” troubles her.

“I am offended by that, because they’re basically saying that I’m failing,” Anjelica told a roomful of parents, community leaders and members of the media. “It is time for people to believe in the students, to believe in the teachers and to believe in our schools. It’s time for people again to believe in GRPS.”

The continued goals of the district are to meet student needs, the needs of the workforce, to meet and exceed AYP, to improve upon a gut-wrenching 52 percent graduation rate and to increase enrollment.

MaryAnn Prisichenko came from Straight Elementary to lead the new Sibley Elementary, a state-of-the-art facility that opened in the 2006-2007 school year. It replaced its underperforming predecessor.

The old Sibley was a mainstay on the failing schools watch list, four years and running, when Ms. Prisichenko issued a challenge to the returning teachers.

“They took it, with few exceptions,” she said, an indicator that staff turnover is no prerequisite for reform.

Sibley Elementary School

Sibley’s primary problems were in the areas of writing, special education and mathematics. A leadership team with at least one representative from each grade level was formed.

“This definitely created a sense of ownership for what was happening,” Principal Prisichenko said. “It made an impact in that we were able to convey more easily that the things we were doing were for a good reason, with an expected result, not just for the sake of creating protocol.

“We needed everyone to be on board, and teacher buy-in was huge,” she said. “I believe that that was the most important part of the turnaround.”

Despite being the most underachieving elementary school in the district, Sibley promptly met Annual Yearly Progress in consecutive years.

“When the scores came back to us, everybody got to such an incredible level of excitement,” Ms. Prisichenko said. “I was hearing things like ‘I never thought kindergartners could read at this level.’ It was pretty amazing the sense of accomplishment.”

And after being so far down the list, teachers and students kept the course.

“We all keep moving up, closing the gaps,” Ms. Prisichenko said. “In terms of progress, two to three percentage point increases are considered good. In some areas we’re seeing numbers like 23 percent.”

There are reasons Dr. Taylor invited Principal Prisichenko to be among the speakers at the recent address. It’s not only because of test scores.

It’s about a stern discipline in setting and reaching goals.

It’s about a new austerity.

Photographs by Lizzie Photo – All Rights Reserved.

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Tags: grps, superintendent, turn around