WESTFIELD – The principals of Abner Gibbs, Franklin Avenue and Highland elementary schools went before the Westfield School Committee last night at City Hall to lay out their plans to maintain academic progress.
Principals Chris Rodgers, Fran St.Pierre and James Keefe of Abner Gibbs, Franklin Ave. and Highland respectively, based their strategies on a district-wide template for “continuous improvement”.
“All of our kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers are implementing our strategies drawn from the Bay State Reading Institute (BSRI),” said Rodgers, who served as principal at North Middle School prior to Abner Gibbs. “If you go into any of our classrooms during the literacy block, you’re seeing whole group instruction and then breaking into outstanding learning centers that are differentiated by really high levels of student collaboration.”
Rodgers also said that BRSi representatives have praised the efforts of his staff for their work.
“They said they were so impressed because our fourth- and fifth-grade teachers are doing this for the very first time, and they’re farther along than some districts they work with, who are in year two or three,” he said. “We’re going to utilize any feedback they (BSRI) have to improve and make our instruction better for our kids.”
“When I went down to Abner, one of the first things out of my mouth was ‘where are all my computer labs?'” he said. “North had six or seven and Abner had one at the time, but we’re making the best of it.”
Rodgers stated that the school is utilizing data to assign technology to “areas of biggest need”, adding that he’d like to place devices in the hands of every student in the school, pushing staff development and student engagement.
“We’re having data meetings regularly at the elementary level, whether it is looking at math benchmarks, DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) scores, MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Systems) data…” he said. “We’re doing what we can to provide the best possible instruction by what the numbers tell us.”
Rodgers said that several Westfield High football players have been in the school working with his students as part of the student engagement component of the initiative.
“They taught them the right way to compete, how to follow rules, how to cooperate on an athletic field,” he said. “These are students that are going to Westfield High or Westfield Voc-Tech, so our goal is to fast track them on what it is going to be like to be a student athlete, if they so choose.”
St. Peter became principal earlier this year after serving as a speech and language pathologist at Franklin Avenue for the past decade and has wasted no time in helping to get the school moving forward.
“We have been a BSRI school and have been implementing Reading Street as well as Envisions Learning,” she said. “Our first initiatives are to continue to do that in a well defined and differentiated way.”
St. Peter added that the school has begun to add the Advantage Math Recovery program for kindergarten to second grade.
“I can’t say enough about our professional learning communities,” she said. “Our staff have really jumped on board with those and, in the past couple months, we’ve analyzed our MCAS data and looked up piece by piece the areas we think we can strengthen our scores so we can rise from level 3 to level 2.”
St. Peter said that the enthusiasm in the school has been “contagious.”
“I will sometimes direct and give ideas, but for the most part it is coming from the teachers themselves,” she said. “If you bring something you want to the table, you’re much more apt to adopt it and use it well.”
Like Rodgers, St. Peter’s staff meetings at the school have revolved around defined aspects, such as differentiated instruction.
“It’s really core to meeting the needs of all of our students across all grade levels,” she said. “We’re collectively joining as a group and we’ll be looking at a new trend called ‘growth mindset’, which is new research about how students view themselves as learners and how students who are more likely to take chances and make mistakes are often the better learners in the long run.”
St. Peter said the school is readying school and teacher climate surveys to learn more about their personnel and spoke of the school’s behavioral acknowledgement program, HEART, which stands for “Honor, Effort, Attitude, Responsibility and Teamwork.”
“We will continue to push that across different locations of the building. We’ve used that in our hallways and behaviors have gone down in those aspects,” she said. “Cafeteria behavior was what we’ve targeted recently. Somebody even walked in and said ‘wow, it’s quiet in here’, which is unusual for a cafeteria.”
Deeper connections with students’ families has also been a point of emphasis for St. Peter.
“Our last set of initiatives is to work very closely with the PTO and PVIS teams, opening our school for things like movie nights,” she said. “Really establishing a connection with parents is really what matters, to us and to our children so that when we have issues isn’t the only time that we’re calling them.”
