Sisters schools fine-tune intervention programs

Focused, individualized intervention is often the key to helping a student in trouble - or headed for trouble - academically or behaviorally. Timely individualized data is the challenge for early intervention. To get this data, teachers need to continue to refine and implement measurement methods that are quick and easy to administer, and easy to interpret.

The school board workshop Wednesday concentrated on the specific tools that each school is now using or will be using, first to identify and then to resolve student academic and behavioral challenges in real time.

New Sisters High School (SHS) principal Joe Hosang used a model that separated students into three general categories, with specific intervention approaches for each category. The first category represents the 80 to 90 percent of the students for whom the core curriculum and typical teaching methods work most of the time.

The second category represents the five to 10 percent of the students having difficulty mastering some of the concepts presented in the regular manner. The needs of these students will be met by targeted group intervention class periods, where the challenging skills may be presented in a different way by a different teacher. These intervention periods will happen frequently, often on a daily basis. Students will move in and out of these intervention sessions as needed.

The third category is made up of students at risk of failing in a particular area. Hosang referred to these students as experiencing a "learning emergency," and he treats these learning emergencies with the same level of urgency as a "behavioral emergency." Students in this category receive intensive, individual, systematic interventions that are assessment-based.

Hosang stressed that interventions in the second and third categories are to be handled by the "local expert" in that subject matter - the teacher with the highest skills in teaching the area of concern.

He sees the need for formal reviewed daily lesson plans with learning targets for that day clearly posted on the board. He is also developing a standards-based report card that will give parents descriptive detailed feedback on how their student is doing against the state standards, and against the soon-to-be national common core standards. There was also broad support for a mentorship program that Hosang is working on that would pair high school kids with middle school kids in need of some one-on-one peer tutoring/counseling. This program is targeted for the 2012-2013 school year.

The lead teacher at Sisters Elementary School, Barbara Kamrath, used a similar three-category model to explain the proactive intervention program at the elementary level. Kamrath stressed the implementation of a new "dynamic scheduling" system, and the success of quick assessment tools to identify students that are being challenged by the core curriculum. These tools provide tests that can take less than a minute to perform and give the teachers a real-time understanding of how well a student is performing to their benchmarks, which tie directly to the state standards.

Dynamic scheduling at SES represents a different approach to the elementary experience. Students often see several teachers in a given day, and the lines between grade levels are blurred by skills-based grouping.

Superintendent Jim Golden noted that, "because of the work we are doing with RTI (response to intervention program) at the elementary level, we will be sending better prepared kids to Sisters Middle School. We will get them higher earlier to get them farther. Our measure of success is, do we get our kids to where they want to go in life?"

Sisters Middle School Principal Mark Stewart uses a model similar to his fellow presenters, but along with intervention resources for academics and behavior challenges, Stewart added the dimension of "social/emotional/physical" systems. These potential intervention resources included school nurse/counseling support, SMS culture summits, eighth grade retreats, outdoor school, athletics, community schools counseling, and SPRD support.

Although such programs typically take two to three years before the results become clearly evident, new board member Andrew Gorayeb noted that "the seeds are in the ground" for some significant positive growth in reading and math performance.

At the close of the meeting, Golden noted that the presentations showed "a lot of collegiality and agreement about "we are not good enough, and we want to get better, and we have a plan to get better, and here it is.' There was a willingness to be self-critical."