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Column: Pinellas school leaders are focusing on the achievement gap

 
Pinellas schools superintendent Mike Grego
Pinellas schools superintendent Mike Grego
Published Aug. 28, 2015

The school district is sharply focused on this urgent need

The past cannot be ignored. Challenges and past conflicts that negatively impacted student achievement need to be mended to make space for moving forward. I feel fortunate to be in a position to help steer such healing. We can do this by listening and learning from the past.

Since the Tampa Bay Times published recent articles, many community members have contacted me to share knowledge, opinions and ideas. I value this input, just as I have since I began as superintendent in September 2012 and began to work with the community on addressing our most pressing needs — eliminating the achievement gap and raising academic expectations and achievement for all students.

The School Board and district leadership prioritized the achievement gap as the urgent focus in Pinellas. This led to the immediate implementation of programs at all levels. More than 150 Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) clubs in elementary and middle schools throughout the county have more than 3,000 students participating. Thousands of students from 46 elementary schools can now take district laptops home to access educational software.

More students are staying on track because of new opportunities for extended instruction, including the six-week Summer Bridge program. Gifted education teachers now work on site at every elementary school to introduce creative thinking skills to all students and identify more gifted students, especially minority students. The district-wide initiative to close the achievement gap of black students, called Bridging the Gap, has led to results in just two years in multiple areas: increased graduation rates, fewer discipline infractions and more black students accessing college-level courses and exams.

In 2014, we began the Scale Up for Success initiative to add needed support to the five elementary schools the Times focused on — Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose. The elements in place at these schools for increasing academic success provide ways to verify the improvement we all seek.

Effective schools have strong leadership, stable workforces and school-wide cultures that foster learning. To nurture these qualities in these schools we added funding, training, teaching partners, social services, mental health counselors, behavior coaches and national consultants. While our investment in one year exceeded $5 million, money alone does not guarantee success. To make progress through these efforts, our focus must be on closely measuring improvement and fine-tuning actions based on results.

The need is urgent. Meaningful change will require a collective effort to do this right and ensure a lasting impact on our community.

In examining data from 2014-2015, the baseline school year of Scale Up for Success, we see shifts upward in academic achievement and downward in behavior problems. This does not guarantee the initiative will work immediately at all five schools; early signs of improvement indicate ongoing analysis, action and adjustment are needed to see greater student achievement.

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While teacher turnover became an issue in the past, retention in the last three years increased more than 14 percent. This year, 68 percent of the staff returned to teach in these five schools. This is a direct result of new preferential hiring processes, recruitment and retention bonuses and the building of stronger school leadership. We will continue to track how many teachers return each year, determine what keeps them there and reinforce those efforts so stability continues to increase.

Other measures we are tracking and working to improve include after-school remediation and enrichment participation, Summer Bridge participation, access to social and mental health services, family engagement, corporate and civic partnerships, the effectiveness and experience level of teachers and participation in culturally responsive instruction trainings. We monitor these areas with two ends in mind: higher student achievement and fewer behavior disruptions.

We must be open to all methods of improving student achievement, including exploring potential parental choice programs. Choice programs are not meant to mask student achievement. They are research-proven methods of raising engagement and achievement. Choice programs provide cultural and economic diversity, but more importantly, they offer individualized educational services without displacing students. The more personalized school becomes, the more students become engaged.

The school district must and will sustain the implementation of systems that address the needs of students. We will continue to aggressively implement and measure the effectiveness of our strategies until we see all students in every school reach their highest potential.

If we work together to transcend the past, our community will heal and our children will thrive.

Michael A. Grego is superintendent of Pinellas County Schools.