Melissa Bailey Photo
Principal Karen Lott.
Two new teachers are preparing for a test next week — one that’s also a test of the city’s first-of-its-kind experiment to transform a failing school.
Amanda Kivell, 24 and Melissa Rhone, 26 (pictured below from left) are fourth-grade classroom teachers at Brennan/Rogers K‑8 school in West Rock, dubbed the city’s first in-house “turnaround” school in a nascent reform drive.
As part of reforms, Principal Karen Lott replaced two-thirds of the teachers there and added 85 minutes to the school day. Also this year, the school won one federal grant to become a magnet school and another to reform the school based on a so-called Turnaround Model; those have paid to put co-teachers and new technology into classrooms.
Now her team of mostly new staffers is facing its first big evaluation, the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), a state-mandated standardized assessment for grades 3 to 8. Under the spotlight of federal, state and local school officials, they’ll try to show that with a wealth of new resources and hand-picked teachers, their students are improving their skills in reading, writing and math.
Because there are so many new teachers, the CMTs will provide the first major benchmark that the staff “owns” together, Lott said.
“That’s a big metric for us.”
Lott has led a literacy push this year to lift reading scores that landed the school at the bottom of the district and on a federal watchlist for failing schools. Last year, only 43 percent of students in grades 3 to 8 scored “proficient” on the reading portion of the CMT, compared to 57 percent district-wide.
The high-stakes testing starts next Monday. Each school day for two weeks, students will spend 45 to 70 minutes per day taking the tests. This year, Lott set what she called “a stretch goal” — to increase by 20 percent the number of kids scoring “proficient.”
About 10 days before the testing starts, Lott met with two of her new teachers to talk about a problem they face: each has a handful of students who appear to be “stuck” reading several grade levels behind their peers. The 45-minute session showed the daunting task of closing that school’s achievement gap and the special challenges of leading a school with so many new staff.
The topic of the meeting was what Lott called a “tough pocket” of kids in the fourth grade. The kids were identified when teachers recently re-administered the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) for grades K to 5. The DRA measures a range of skills related to reading, including fluency, summarizing, retelling and comprehension.
The tests showed that each grade has a pocket of a half-dozen kids who showed little or no improvement on reading since the fall, Lott said.
In the fourth grade, seven kids fit that category.
“That’s a real red flag,” Lott said — for classroom instruction and for the interventions the school is using each week to target those kids’ reading skills.
Wearing a gray suit and thin high heels and brandishing a walkie talkie, Lott walked up the long ramp to the literacy room Thursday morning. She sat down at a large table with literacy coach Jennifer Blue.
Kivell and Rhone, both first-year teachers at the school, joined them at the table.
Rhone, who’s in her first year as a teacher, took a first turn in reporting on her students’ progress so far: six of her students scored a 40 on the DRA, meaning they’re reading at grade level. She has four students who appear to be “stuck” — they’re reading on a first- or second-grade level and have shown little improvement.
That’s four kids out of a total of 15. Because of the time they joined the school — on the ground level of the turnaround effort — both teachers have small classrooms compared to the rest of the district.
Kivell, who joined the district after teaching in West Haven for a year, has 14 students in her class. The class size is especially low this year because Superintendent Reggie Mayo agreed to cap new admissions after October in the first year of its new experiment, according to Lott. She said class sizes will grow in future years, but the relief from new students joining class mid-year has helped build a more stable environment.
Rhone detailed each struggling kid’s specific set of strengths and hangups.
One student needs constant guidance when reading alone, she said.
“He would rather do anything than reading.” If he isn’t redirected, he’ll spend the time joking around or sharpening a pencil. However, she said, he’s a dedicated student and he’s strong in math. “He’s a hard-worker. He won’t give up.”
The other is “a slow, quiet reader,” Rhone said. She can’t hear what he says when he reads. After reading a passage on the DRA, “he couldn’t summarize the story.”
Rhone said his mom visited the school and “wasn’t happy” with her son’s progress. Rhone sent a work packet home, and even sent lined paper because the boy didn’t have any. But his mom doesn’t sign the homework and she’s not sure if she’s checking up.
Lott suggested Rhone call Mom and “give her that sense of urgency.” The student is already two years behind his peers in reading.
“That gap will only get wider,” Lott cautioned.
Then she gave some background information to help fill out the picture. Lott knows the boy from last year. She reported that he had failed summer school and repeated third grade — something his literacy coach and teacher were not aware of. In several other cases discussed Thursday, Lott filled in key information about the kid’s life — one had a death in the family, another first grade, one missed a lot of school to go to therapy.
While this is only her second year at the school, Lott is a relative veteran on staff — for many kids and families, hers was the only face they recognized when they returned to school this year.
As the first principal of an in-house turnaround school, Lott got unprecedented authority in picking her own staff. All the teachers had to reapply for their jobs. Of the 35 teachers at the school last year, only 12 got hired back. Lott hand-picked another 30 teachers from as far away as South Carolina.
While she got over 200 applicants, Lott said she didn’t get many veteran teachers signing up to work at Brennan/Rogers, which was offering extra compensation but a longer, eight-hour school day.
The result was a new crop of teachers who didn’t have relationships with the kids and their families. Lott said she’s making an extra effort to maintain her personal connection with the kids and the families in this transition year. On Thursday, that meant taking aside a girl who refused to take off her coat (a violation of school dress code), and talking her out of a grumpiness about returning to school after three days February vacation. A former school counselor, Lott squatted down to talk to another girl who had been sent out of a classroom for acting out. She talked to each kid with warmth and a personal touch.
Lott said she underestimated the resistance students would have when the returned to school in the fall to find everything had changed.
“Kids felt a sense of abandonment — Where are the people I knew?” Lott said. Facing more rigorous academics and longer school day, kids had a spike in behavioral problems in the fall, she said. Lott said she has felt a personal responsibility to help kids through the transition, even if it means staying at school until 7 p.m. to get her administrative work done.
The upside of the new staffing model, said Lott, is that the new teachers “brought an openness and energy to what was going to be a daunting task.” They’ve proved to be quick to adapt to change, she said.
Kivell and Rhone, for example, just went through a training mid-year on a new type of reading intervention called Plugged In. In the past, Lott said, there might have been an “uproar of resistance” among veteran teachers to making that change mid-year. But the new teachers took it in stride.
In their meeting Thursday, Lott and Kivell worked out another change to her students’ reading intervention.
Kivell said in her classroom she has two students with very weak vocab.
“They’re so much lower than the rest of the class. I’m just worried,” she said.
Kivell said she has three kids who are “not moving.” Those kids get pulled out of class for 30 minutes at a time for daily comprehension intervention, where they read in groups of no more than six kids.
“I don’t think it’s doing anything,” Kivell said.
Lott and Blue strategized with both teachers about how to better reach each kid. They agreed on a set of changes to reach the kids, including changing interventions and pairing kids with new college-age literacy tutors.
“I feel better,” said Lott at the end of the meeting. “You know your kids — you know what their strengths and weaknesses are.”
“You’re on the right track.”
Past stories on the Brennan/Rogers School:
• Parents Prepare To Help “Govern” 4 Schools
• At Turnaround School, A Reading Push
• In Garden, Teachers Tackle Special Ed Challenge
• Brennan/Rogers Earns Magnet Status
• No Naps For These Kids
• Turnaround Team Sets To Work
• Two Failing Schools Aim High
• West Rock Kids Reap Two-Wheeled Rewards
• Brennan/Rogers Prepares For Turnaround