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Education Expo Showcases Student Accomplishments, Initiatives

Gomez Elementary sixth grader G'nique Hazel works on vocabulary during Saturday's eSIP Expo.Schools across the St. Thomas-St. John District are putting more focus on improving reading and math levels this year, and Education Department officials said giving teachers more access to training, boosting science programs and making classrooms more technology ready are the top priorities over the next few months.

The district’s fourth annual eSIP (education system improvement process) Expo gave both sides a chance to talk to parents and community members about their plans, while highlighting ongoing initiatives. The event was held Saturday at the Tutu Park Mall.

Overall, most district and department officials said the primary goal is continuing the transition to the Common Core State Standards while also preparing students to take their first online assessment – in reading and math – in 2015.

The Common Core seeks to make “all students college and career ready” by the time they graduate. While there has been a lot of debate over the initiative nationally, school representatives said it is making an impact in the classroom. The new standards set the proficiency bar higher for each grade level, but also focuses on improving how the material is being taught and how struggling students can get help.

Joseph Gomez Elementary School Principal Jamon Liburd said he has implemented a program called WordlyWize, which focuses on improving students’ vocabulary skills. Liburd said Saturday that each grade level has to learn a certain number of words – between 200 and 400 – by the end of the school year, and are competing against each other to see which class finishes first.

Sprauve School's acting Principal Joey Skelton, left, and third grade teacher Jeune Provost man the school's booth at eSIP.“For us, it’s fun,” Gomez sixth grader Adajah George said at Saturday’s event, as she and classmate G’nique Hazel sat working on the program at a computer set up behind the school’s booth. George explained that the students have been given workbooks with a selection of words for each grade, then have to work through the computer to learn the definition and complete activities that show how well they understand the meaning.

At Ulla F. Muller Elementary, school officials are piloting a program called Response to Intervention to help students struggling with the new material.

“With this, we are hoping to use various forms of intervention programs and strategies, but in a structured way,” Muller Assistant Principal Daphne Thomas explained Saturday. “First, we test the students at the beginning of the year, and based on those results they are placed in one of three tiers: tier one for stronger students, tier two for mixed students, and tier three for weaker students. The students from tier two and three are then given assistance based on their needs and we hope to see with this a decrease in students needing intervention by the end of the year.”

Along with looking at the academics, many school officials said they are working on “improving school culture,” which they explained means making the campuses “more welcoming” environments for both the students and staff. Many also said that making positive strides means taking a hard look at how conflicts are resolved and moving toward policies that look at each problem and student individually.

“One of the major policy changes we’re looking at for the schools is moving from a punitive disciplinary policy to a restorative justice model that we think could have a major impact on student behavior,” Board of Education member Nandi Sekou said at Saturday’s event.

The board is tasked with developing policies that would be implemented by the Education Department.

“We have had a lot of mini-conferences and workshops where we’ve interviewed teachers, students, parents and teachers to get their input and so far, there seems to be a lot of support for this,” Sekou said. “So, now we’re in the drafting stages and I think in terms of discipline it’s going to make students more responsible overall for their behavior.”

Sekou said students are sometimes punished for bad behavior, but often don’t understand “exactly what they have done.”

“With the restorative justice model, they will not only have to acknowledge that they did something wrong, they will have to come face to face with whomever they have affected and they will have to look at corrective measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

The system will partner with a new initiative that Education officials said was just rolled out into the schools to combat bad behavior. Called PBIS, or positive behavioral intervention support, the initiative works with all students and staff on conflict management and proper conflict resolution. The department was also just awarded a three-year grant that will help put counselors on the campuses and provide the training needed for teachers.

“We’ll be going back in two weeks to all the of the schools and getting their feedback on how the roll-outs went,” Jill Singer, Education’s Special Education director, said Saturday. “We’ll be meeting with our school teams and in December, there will be two days where they can all come together and share their data and progress. The real purpose of this is to ensure that our students and the adults in each school understand how to handle one another and use the same same language so that when they are talking to one another, they are doing it in a positive way instead of a punitive way.”

Making sure staff members feel safe on campus is also important, Lockhart Elementary Principal Audrey Bowry said Saturday. While the school has seen decreases in incidences of bullying based on their “zero-tolerance” policy, efforts have also focused on making the environment more safe for teachers and those issues have also been highlighted in what Bowry said are professional learning communities, or PLCs, that bring the staff together for discussions on a regular basis.

“This system also helps us with teacher growth,” Bowry added. “We are using our PLCs so that grade level by grade level and across grade levels, we are improving what teachers do, how they teach and how students learn. Administrators also, we are trying to improve how we supervise. We must provide the support to our teachers in order to help them to grow, and that means not only resources like books and training, but administrators are going to be sitting down with individual teachers and working on their individual needs. We also will provide time to with another teacher, with their peers, on evaluations and getting feedback on their strengths and where they can grow.”

Collaboration between teachers is also a “key for success” at St. John’s Julius Sprauve School. This school year, Sprauve took on the students from the now closed Guy Benjamin School but Sprauve staff said Saturday that the transition has strengthened the campus.

“We are doing more collaborating now than ever before, because now we actually have two of every grade,” Sprauve third grade teacher Jeune Provost said Saturday. “So, as a third grade teacher, I’m able to sit down every day with the other third grade teacher and actually say, lets take a look at this student, how he’s doing, and what he needs to focus on – it has really made a world of difference.”

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