Kent School Board has a great plan | Tate

The Kent School District Board selected Edward Lee Vargas as superintendent three years ago. Prior to the nationwide search, the board conducted a survey of the stakeholders – including community, families and district employees – to determine what they thought the district needed in a superintendent. All groups surveyed indicated needing a superintendent to help educators effectively respond to a myriad of diversity issues.

Now, we can see some ways Vargas has responded.

Tiered Intervention (TI) came to the district with Vargas. It’s a method by which teams of teachers in a building come together to determine the needs of individual students, and to focus on those needs in three tiers. The goal is to have all students reach tier one, which is the students best chance for meeting state standards; that is, to pass the test.

A laser focus on the needs of individual students is one of Vargas’ and his team’s solutions to the vast diversity among students. If a student has language issues as an obstacle to learning, educators work with that. They work with students behavior and issues. They work with the learning disabilities. They adapt to an array of different religious beliefs, a multitude of different ethnic customs, a variety of learning styles, and work with practically as much other kinds of diversity as there exist in human kind.

Clearly teachers in TI classrooms at Panther Lake exemplify addressing the social and academic needs of individual students. Some teachers say they have seen remarkable student results with TI.

While TI is working for students, the workload for some teachers throughout the district has escalated to a point where they are considering leaving the profession or looking for work elsewhere. The Kent Education Association (KEA) leadership says TI may be achieving great results, but there are several unintended consequences that negatively impact teachers.

Those issues need to be addressed before the district loses its best and brightest teachers, says the KEA. More details about the high quality of work of Panther Lake teachers and TI can be found in a photo expose at news.synrgy.us/files/Pantherlaketeachersinaction.pdf

The district’s strategic plan may have responses to diversity that not only support teachers, but it also calls for more family and community engagement. The KSD board of directors are on the right track in their statements indicating. “… Parents have a shared responsibility for their children’s in-school academic achievement and behavioral conduct … ” and further, “… The board directs the superintendent to put into operation programs, activities and procedures for the involvement of parents in all of its schools as written in federal and state requirements …”

Elements in the district’s strategic plan calls for “a culture of shared responsibility” for education. Other documents have details describing what parent involvement looks like, and the documents present methods by which schools can engage families and communities. Suffice it to say, it’s a plan developed including community participation and designed to systemically change the way education is delivered in the district.

Among other elements of the plan, Vargas and his team have established a system to involve parents and community. To that end, a School Improvement Team (SIT) is being implemented at each school, and the district is also placing emphasis on building partnerships with community organizations to share the responsibility for education.

The SITs are required to have diverse populations of parents, community and organizations that reflect the demographics of each school community.

According to the SIT documents, each school will encourage populations they serve to become involved in the schools and involved in their students learning at home. The plan empowers parents to sign off on the school’s Site Improvement Plan (SIP). Vargas’ team also provides a ton of research indicating how critical it is to have parents involved in their children’s education in a variety of ways. They also provide a few laws indicating requirements for parent involvement.

The questions are: will the school leaders be successful in engaging diverse families and communities? Will parents, community members and organizations step up to share the responsibility for education? Success for many students is largely contingent upon the actions of these adult groups because students generally tend to live up to expectations when their adult role models agree on standards of performance and support one another.

Cheers to board members Bill Boyce, Tim Clark, Karen DeBruler, Russ Hanscom and board president Debbie Straus. They realize schools only have students about six hours out of a 24-hour day and only 180 days out of a 365 day year, and there is only so much educators can do with that amount of time. Under the circumstances the board has set a plan in motion that’s really a great response to a myriad of diversity and equity issues.

As hard as the teachers at Panther Lake and other schools work, educators can’t carry 100 percent of the workload for educating children in today’s world. Children are in families and the community close to 90 percent of the time.

We need to share the workload and responsibility for education. Perhaps we can help make the plan work, increase student performance and retain good teachers.

Learn more about the KSD Strategic Plan and other documents at www.kent.k12.wa.us/site/default.aspx?PageID=1