Fix schools? Opinions pour in

Assistant superintendent of instruction and educational services Steve Godla talks to members of DELTA. Del Norte Triplicate/Bryant Anderson

Student attendance problems, especially in the crucial early grades.

A lack of engagement in the classroom for many students who find the material they’re studying irrelevant to their lives.

A dearth of role models in a community with more than its share of adults who never graduated from high school.

It’s not all doom and gloom in Del Norte County schools, but there’s been enough recent negative feedback to fuel the call for reform.

While some local educators have been working on changes for quite a while, community meetings and visits from consultants have continued to document local schools’ perceived shortcomings and what can be done about them.

A team of leaders

A leadership team of teachers representing each school in the Del Norte County Unified School District was formed in 2010 to study innovative teaching practices and educational models that have had success in other school districts.

Members of the District Educational Leadership Team and Associates (DELTA) have read books, heard presentations from outside educators and visited schools in central California and Colorado.

Meanwhile, community members have been asked for input during a series of meetings held at schools this past month.

DELTA is now crafting a model for Del Norte schools to raise student achievement, improve attendance and engage students in learning. The goal is to produce educated, well-rounded high school graduates ready for adulthood and making healthy life choices.

This model will be implemented system-wide across all schools.

“All of us have tackled small school site change,” said Superintendent Don Olson. “We’re talking about district-wide implementation.”

A qualified workforce

Not long after the California Endowment selected Del Norte to be part of its 10-year Building Healthy Communities initiative, meetings started occurring for locals to talk about what they thought was hindering people from being healthy.

Education kept coming up.

Participants “felt that education of our youth was the most powerful thing we could do to improve our health,” said Susan Strong, a retired nurse who is a consultant with Building Healthy Communities helping with the school reform effort.

Students who are more educated are more likely to make healthy choices in their lives, Strong said.

“For me, there was a moment,” said Geneva Wiki, a coordinator for Building Healthy Communities in Del Norte and adjacent tribal lands.

During one community meeting, a forum of business leaders expressed frustration over the difficulty of hiring workers.

“Every single one said it was hard to find people to show up each day, pass a drug test and work hard,” Wiki said. They said then, “We have jobs, but we don’t have a qualified workforce to take those jobs.”

It was decided by the community that change was needed to produce educated young people with a plan for after high school and the skills necessary to get jobs and make healthy choices in their lives.

DELTA was created soon thereafter.

Creating a Del Norte model

The school district and Building Healthy Communities held meetings at each school  to find out what people believe an educated graduate should have in their “tool kit,” Strong said.

Throughout the community, 469 residents provided about 3,600 comments on what they thought was working and what should be done in schools. At a DELTA meeting recently, Strong said that some of the common themes were:

• More personalized learning facilitated by smaller class sizes.

• Curriculum that prepares students for careers, but also addresses students health and teaches life skills such as money management and hygiene.

• Schools should embrace multiculturalism and include lessons on cultural diversity.

• Schools should provide more behavioral and mental health support.

• Better teacher-student-parent relationships are needed.

“This will become the Del Norte model for education and we have to get it right,” Olson said of the time and effort being put into creating a model.

Relevance to students

One of the goals of DELTA is to make curriculum more engaging for students.

A number of students are chronically missing school. In a “Youth Truth” survey of high-schoolers, students said they wanted more rigorous curriculum that was relevant to their lives and interests.

The school district brought in Jim Warford of the national organization International Center for Leadership in Education to talk to DELTA members about doing exactly that.

The center helps school districts implement organizational changes that incorporate world-class curriculum, instruction, and assessment systems, according to its website leadered.com.

“Everybody is talking about rigor and relevance,” Warford said. “Relevance makes rigor possible.”

Some teaching methods are outdated, Warford said, and today’s children don’t find them revelant to their world.

School is a “chalkboard world,” while students are living in an “iPhone world,” he said.

With advances in technology, students are “wired differently” and traditional education has not caught up, he said.

Technology can be leveraged to deliver instruction, Warford said, and will be more engaging to students, which should increase achievement.

Warford gave examples of how technology can help them with homework.

There’s Wolfram Alpha at wolframalpha.com, a “knowledge engine” that allows users to ask a question and get an answer on a wide array of subjects.  The Kahn Academy, khanacademy.org, offers a library of 2,700 videos on K-12 subjects with lessons and exercises.

‘Close engagement gap’

Teachers may think that they understand students’ interest and have made instruction engaging, but the kids don’t always agree, Warford said.

To increase engagement, the information has to be relevant to what they want to do, he said, and not just because it’s on the test.

“You must close the engagement gap before you can close the achievement gap,” Warford said.

To make curriculum more rigorous and relevant, teachers have to direct lessons so students take in information and think critically about it, but also apply that knowledge to real-world situations.

Students need to be able to think and do, meaning education must prepare them for both college and career, not one or the other, he said. Students who go to college will have to apply their knowledge to their job and those who go into a vocational career will need to be able to think critically and read and write well, he said.

“It’s not just that they’re doing the work and coming up with the right answer,” Warford said, “but that they are asking the right questions.”

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