Those are defined as having both a school performance grade of D or F – and an Evaluation Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) growth status of ‘Does Not Meet Expectations’ or ‘Meets Expectations’. (EVAAS is a proprietary analytics software, you can find an in-depth explainer from EdNC here.)
While the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction is looking into ways to improve the components of the school grading system, as of now, 80% comes from a student’s achievement or proficiency on end-of-year tests, and 20% comes from growth based on this EVAAS score.
School Board Member Stephanie Walker, Superintendent Dr. Charles Foust, and Chief Academic Officer Dr. Patrice Faison are leading the task force of 16 members made up of local officials and educational experts. (*See a full list of members at the end of this story.)
The stated goal of the task force is to find ways to fix these low-performing schools. Faison said the members were assembled not to “blame anyone” or to “change everything,” but to review the data – and let those numbers drive ideas around eventual recommendations.
Task Force’s initial data
During the inaugural meeting of the task force, Faison began by explaining the data on these 12 schools — and the difference between proficiency and growth.
Proficiency, as Faison described, is whether kids make it to the “wall” at the end of the year, essentially their achievement level on end-of-year tests, whereas growth is whether or not the student grew by the end of the school year.
Faison said that the way to proficiency is ultimately to focus on growth – and if principals and teachers concentrate on growth, they can eventually get students to obtain higher scores on these tests.
Around 30% of schools in New Hanover County are considered low performing. This number has increased dramatically, jumping from 13% in 2019 to 30% in 2022. However, the county’s low-performance trends are consistent with statewide numbers. By comparison, 42% of schools have a low-performing designation in Pender County, and 26% in Brunswick County.
More than half of New Hanover’s low-performing schools are elementary schools. Faison attributes this number, which has been growing, to pandemic-related learning loss.
Last school year, Forest Hills Elementary and Wrightsboro Elementary were the only two elementary schools out of the 12 that scored both an F letter grade and a “Not Met” on the EVAAS growth scale. Snipes, Freeman, and Williston scored an F but maintained a positive “Met” growth status.
Middle schools fared better, with a lower proportion receiving both an F and a “Not Met” designation.
Among proficiency scores, Freeman scored the lowest with a 10% overall score. No other schools fell below 10%, but all elementary schools failed to get above 50%.
Nearly all 12 were lower than the district’s average for both elementary and middle schools. Only one school between the two sets, the Career Readiness Academy, surpassed the district’s average for middle school (55%).
All of the low-performing schools have a student population that is at least half economically disadvantaged. Three have populations that are at least 70% and two, Mosley and Freeman, are at least 90%.
Additionally, the racial makeup of the 12 are largely minority students.
Teacher retention at these low-performing schools is also another issue. Faison said the county has an overall retention rate of 85%; but for a majority of those designated as low performing (eight out of the 12), they have some of the lowest retention rates — with some of them even being as low as 61%.
“We have schools where 39% of our teachers are in and out, in and out, in and out. That's a high attrition rate. How do you develop and build culture and get some stability there?” Faison said.
Addressing teacher retention, issue of retaining students
Faison addressed openly the issue of teachers being attracted to higher-performing schools.
“I want you to think about, what is a school that you think is easy to teach [at]? I don't want you to say anything. I just want you to think. Now what is a school [where] it's challenging to teach? I don’t want you to say anything. You're a teacher, which one are you going to?” Faison said shortly thereafter, “That’s our challenge.”
Faison praised principals like Diego Lehocky at Sunset Park Elementary, who’s slated to take the helm at Forest Hills Elementary next school year, for having some of the highest gains in the district.
She mentioned about half of the student population at Sunset speaks English as a second language but said the “school is so close to a C that they can smell it." She credited Lehocky’s strong leadership, low staff turnover rates, and ‘meeting kids where they are,’ — meaning focusing more on growth than achieving specific grade goals.
Task force member and city councilman Clifford Barnett asked Faison, “What do the principals need to be more successful? Is it more bodies in the school?”
Faison responded, “I'll be honest, I think they would say that, but I would say the data doesn't say that. But I think as a principal, I'm never going to say, ‘I have too much.’ I mean, you’re just not. ‘I can always take more.’ I don't know if you guys are aware, but we [the county] supplement[s] more [positions] than what the state does already.”
Barnett also asked her whether the district is retaining children who are failing — in other words, holding them back to repeat a grade.
She said with the exception of kindergarten and/or first grade, “the research says the worst thing you can do to our students is to hold them back. The worst thing.”
And with the example of Sunset Park, Barnett asked, could it be the degree of parental involvement that makes the school a success? Barnett mentioned that immigrant communities often expect their children to take advantage of the education they’re provided.
Faison said, “Parenting is critical, but we can do it [improve academic success] in the 7.5 hours that we have them [each day].”
The real estate problem
Some of the members openly addressed the elephant in the room: middle to upper-class families can just buy or rent homes in neighborhoods with better-performing schools.
Walker said, “So when you do neighborhood schools, if parents that want to move here, they look at the grading of the schools, they go, ‘Oh, I don't want to live here.’ And then you never change anything that way.”
Related: The Newsroom: The StarNews report on Wilmington’s segregated schools and neighborhoods
Dr. Foust agreed — and said he understood the issue.
"Where realtors are looking at the schools, when they are looking to sell a home, ‘this is a high performing school.’ Although we say that the grade, that doesn't matter, parents look at grades of a school when they're moving in, economic development looks at the grade of a school,” Foust said.
But despite this problem, the superintendent said it’s about what expectations are being set in the building.
“How do we make sure that the same expectation that they get at a high-performing school is the expectation that they get at a low-performing school? Why is it that a high-performing school makes or exceeds growth and a low-performing school doesn’t?” He added, “If you are in whatever neighborhood, that's the most prominent neighborhood here, that has the most prominent school, what happens in that school? There's an expectation when you first walk into the community. [...]. So why is it you go six miles down the road, and there's no expectation? That's why our kids get into trouble.”
Beyond expectations, and addressing racial disparities, ACEs
Task force member and former Director of Government Affairs at NHRMC Scott Whisnant said he’s looked at the data extensively and realized, “There are some that are very low performing schools, even more so than the others, and those are the ones, sadly, that to correlate with race. I believe the district has a problem reaching Black children. We've got to put it out there.”
But Whisnant said fixing this issue is complicated.
“Maybe even more complicated than even hiring certain kinds of teachers. We're gonna have to have teachers who want to be in those schools, regardless of experience level. I think we need to understand that when we talk about the difference between the races between the kids – African American children are doing significantly worse – and that's actually through the whole district, but especially when you get them concentrated in a handful of schools to the point where intervention needs to be really multifaceted and very creative,” Whisnant said.
Walker said her reason for the task force’s creation was to address these racial disparities in the schools, as well as to create an adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)-informed district.
Walker openly described to the members details of her traumatic childhood — experiences like parental mental health struggles and sexual abuse.
“And I just want to pause for a second just to say this, ‘How much learning do you think was happening for me when I was in school?’” Walker said.
She added, “I don't believe that it's an exaggeration to say that I am lucky. I'm alive and I survived. So this is why I wanted to talk about ACEs. For kids who deal with a lot of trauma in the home, it's very difficult for them to learn. They're in survival mode. School is a safe place for kids, they get a meal, they get supervision, hopefully, they get some learning done, but it's difficult.”
Walker said she wanted this task force to focus on helping children who are struggling with ACEs. She said that positive adults like her grandmother, teachers, counselors, and an assistant principal at New Hanover High School supported her through these tough times.
Task Force members’ initial ideas
Some of those positive adults in the schools are Communities In Schools (CIS) support specialists. Marrio Jeter, a task force member and director of operations at CIS, said he wanted to see 25% of the low-performing schools become a “full-service community school model.”
“It is through the Department of Education. There's an incentivized pay scale for teachers. The school families receive services and case management supports. The parents of the students receive job training and wellness screenings,” Jeter said.
Other ideas were from Port City United’s Jarett Gattison asking for more community events. Barnett said adults need to have more interactions with kids out in the community. New Hanover County Commissioner Rob Zapple talked more about incentives for teachers in that they could “offer housing subsidies to teachers and staff.”
Cristen Williams of Coastal Horizons said that if the district wants to improve those low-performing schools they have to start with improving educators’ lives.
“And so we were talking about ACEs, we were talking about if we can see them, we can be them, but that also means having a healthy system of educators who have the capacity to reach kids in the way that they need to be reached, so understanding how we can keep kids the focus, but how can we engage kids by engaging grown-ups,” Williams said.
Whisnant said he wanted the task force to support funding universal pre-K and to “fund tools so that all third graders can read whether that's tutors, assistant teachers.”
Member Elizabeth Redenbaugh of Coastal Horizons, who is also a former New Hanover County School Board member, said that in order for the task force to be effective government officials have to be on board.
“We can have all the wonderful ideas in the world from this task force, but if we don't have our school board on with us, our county commissioners, our state representatives, etc., we're not going to get anywhere. So I think that has to be an integral part of what we do,” Redenbaugh said.
Next steps
By the next June meeting, Faison said it’s her hope that task force members have the results of a principal’s needs assessment, detailing what resources would help them the most.
The members also discussed who wasn’t at the “table” to help solve this problem — and whether they needed to add new representatives.
Faison also said she wants to invite different principals to attend these quarterly task force meetings so the members can hear various perspectives on the district’s schools.
They’ll also be re-examining the task force’s mission and vision statements. Some members said they wanted a more concise and pithier statement. One that, Whisnant said, a person could say to “someone in an elevator.”
As the first meeting ended, Walker summarized the main purpose of summoning the members to work on the 12 schools:
“This community [is] changing, but there are some things that just not have changed that need to absolutely change in order for our kids to do well. And I want to see them grow up and be able to get a job and have a life, do something for themselves, be productive members of our society.”
Resources
Low Performing Schools Improvement Plan, NHCS
Turnaround Task Force Data Presentation by Ben Schachtman on Scribd
