School cheers rise from 'low-performing' category

WALKERTOWN - The atmosphere at Middle Fork Elementary School was one of celebration. The school's teachers, its staff and administration gathered in the gym earlier this week and danced to Chris Brown's song "Forever," mimicking a video on YouTube.

Then talk turned to the coming school year.

There were handouts, markers and other typical school supplies.

And there was something else that has become as regular a part of the school year as chalk and lunchboxes once were: talk of test scores.

Middle Fork is one of nine schools that were categorized as low-performing last school year by the state's ABCs of Public Education evaluation system.

Earlier this month, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school system learned that all nine of those schools had risen from low-performing to the priority-school category.

Donald Hampton, the school's energetic principal, grabbed a microphone and delivered the good news: "We are no longer saddled with that awful label, nonperforming," he said, to cheers from the teachers.

But the bad news is that priority schools are the second-lowest achievement level, with less than half their students performing at or above the desired grade level.

To see improvement, teachers and staff members at those low-performing schools will need to focus even more of their limited resources in the coming school year, even as the school system is cutting back on language instruction, furloughing some teachers, and laying off some teaching assistants.

"It's always a tightrope you walk," Hampton said. "You want to keep people up and motivated. When you get a positive trend, you try to ride it upward."

The good news is that schools have more and more tools available to help them assess what's going on in the young minds they are teaching, Superintendent Don Martin said.

School administrators assessed children starting kindergarten by means of a system called DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Learning Skills). The assessment showed that children here started out on par with their peers across the country, Martin said.

But by midyear, they were falling behind. The school system adjusted its kindergarten curriculum, and by the end of the year, those children had caught up.

Two years ago principals began doing regular walk-throughs, coming to classrooms regularly to help teachers, Martin said. For example, the principal might note whether teachers are asking questions that require children to use analytical skills, which require a higher level of thinking, he said.

Martin said that with each jump in progress comes a rise in expectations.

"People talk about basketball players having a breakthrough performance," he said. "Next game, the hope is that breakthrough performance will continue. That in itself provides pressure."

This year, cutbacks will poduce their own challenges.

Foreign-language classes are being eliminated in third and fourth grades, Martin said. Most schools will take that time -- roughly 85 minutes a week -- and add it to time in the media center and rest of the curriculum.

At the end of last school year, the hours worked by teacher assistants and other clerical assistants were reduced, and the system was planning to furlough teachers for two days and administrators for five days.

At the beginning of the month, Congress passed a jobs bill that may allow the local school system to restore the hours it cut and eliminate furloughs, Martin said. The school board will be discussing any changes in the coming weeks.

Donny Lambeth, the chairman of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School Board, said that the money came out of the blue.

"This is sort of a nice pot of money," he said. "We'll deal with some shortfalls, make sure we remain competitive in the marketplace, and think about over the next few years where we'll spend our money."

The pressures on teachers and the staff are not going away anytime soon, he said.

Hampton said that understanding what goes on outside of school is often as important in helping children as what goes on at school.

For example, his school's Hispanic students are still lagging behind in reading, he said. Middle Fork's teacher of English as a Second Language thinks that putting books into students' homes, even in Spanish, could help build bring up reading scores.

When Hampton arrived at Middle Fork four years ago, he realized that there was no bus service to the school, which made it tough for parents to get there for conferences and activities. So the school formed a partnership with the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Club across from Lakeside Apartments, where many students live. Some school programs are held there instead of on school grounds, he said.

Teachers said that at schools with low test scores, the climate for learning is as important as the type of curriculum.

Tiffany Lawson, a third-grade teacher at Middle Fork, said that for children to do the work they need to do, it is imperative to make school a place where children want to be.

You make it fun, you give them a sense of progression, and you keep the kids wanting to come to school, she said.

She said that one student got a 30 percent on one test. The next time, the child scored 55 percent. That is still a failing grade, the student said.

"But you grew," Lawson responded.

mgiunca@wsjournal.com


727-4089