By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Some baseline standards for grade promotion. A Park Elementary School teacher went before the USD 428 Board of Education Monday night to address concerns about what teachers in the district are going through and how that impacts those teachers.
"We need something because this is leading to teacher burnout," she said. "I will be honest. In the past two years, this has become a bigger problem for me and whether I want to continue teaching in a district where my kids will flat out tell me, in the past two years, 'I don't have to. I will go on anyway. I will do it if you give me a pizza party. If you do this.'"
An agenda item for later in Monday's meeting included an explanation of the Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS) system used by Great Bend and many other districts around the state to chart student progress by grouping students into one of three tiers based on academic progress. The teacher said 52 percent of her students were two grades behind, or tier three, in words-per-minute reading. That figure climbed to 57 percent for reading comprehension and was 48 percent in math. Board Member Sara Williams agreed there is an issue.
"I think what she said is absolutely essential," Williams said. "As a board member, it disturbs me to have 'mastery' in our student exit outcomes and not be expecting that. We say they're going to graduate with mastery but where is that expectation?"
USD 428 has used MTSS for just over a decade and administrators maintain the program has been effective. JoAnn Blevins, director of teaching and learning for USD 428, said a better picture of progress is painted in the details.
"What happens sometimes when we look at the data is we don't always get to see and celebrate that growth because that number just says, 'You're not performing,'" she said. "But when you dig deeper into that individual student's data or classroom, we can show tremendous growth. When we look at our system's data over time, we can see kids catching up. By the time they get to middle school, those numbers significantly increase."
Both Blevins and Assistant Superintendent John Popp agreed that holding back, or retaining, a student is one of the worst things a district can do. Blevins corresponded with author and Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
"His email to me was, 'If you retain, which no district should, you do it only with great pangs of guilt,'" she said. "The research is pretty clear it has a strong negative impact on kids socially, emotionally, and academically. Any gains you might have short-term academically wear off. They don't have it for the long term."
Blevins said USD 428 also has certain socioeconomic traits that contribute to overall student success.
"When you have 65-70 percent of your students who are coming poverty, who are coming from sometimes generational poverty, that impacts that background knowledge, that impacts the ability to overcome some of those things," she said.
Popp said the district has held back kids, typically kindergartners, and the results have rarely been positive.
"That next year, they're a behavior issue," he said. "They're taking the same content again and they don't want to be there. They're away from their peers. It's detrimental for them. We've seen it for years and years."
Williams held firm that something must be done to benefit all members of the community.
"They have full capabilities of doing it but they have no motivation for doing it," she said of some students. "It's not a development thing, it's a motivational thing. When we're not evaluating them with high expectations that we say we hold our kids to - there has to be a balance. There needs to be some sort of motivation for the sake of our teachers, for the sake of our students, for the sake of who we are as a school and who we say we are in providing a good education for our kids."
Blevins said even threatening to hold back a student can cause breakdowns in the teacher-parent-student relationship. Board Member Randy Wetzel said because Great Bend High School students need a certain number of credits to graduate, the idea of retention is always there. Even that has not proven effective in some cases.
"It doesn't matter to some kids," he said. "It doesn't motivate them, so you have to find what motivates that kid with individual work and individual plans, whatever it takes. Just threatening them, they'll dig a deeper hole. I saw it happen year after year after year."
Wetzel said some students just require extra work. Programs like MTSS are designed to provide intervention to students not meeting expectations.
"What I found in all my years is, if you sit down a kid and talk to them and reason with them, sooner or later, you're going to get there," Wetzel said. "It might be April of their senior year, but sooner or later, you're going to get to them. You have to find what motivates them. Holding a threat over their head doesn't get it done."
All said with comments from the teacher and board members, Monday's discussion approached one hour. Williams said it is important for teachers to know they are being heard.
"She's talking about burnout and the MTSS resources are not there because of illness or whatever is happening in the buildings," she said. "Her passion about the frustrations and expectations on teachers, the lack of faculty to present all the resources we are trying to have available to them but ultimately are not available because we don't have enough people to implement them, we need to make sure teachers like her are feeling heard. She presents something and we say we will take this into consideration, we will do the next thing with it, we need to make sure it doesn't just stop here with this discussion but we are following up and doing something for her sake so she's feeling supported and heard. It's not just her. She's representing a group of teachers."