Principals build sense of common purpose

Principals build sense of common purpose

By Cara Solomon
Seattle Times Eastside bureau

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The Lake Washington School District is taking a new approach to student achievement this fall, breaking down the challenge one neighborhood at a time.

The district has carved four "learning communities" out of its sprawling landscape, which crosses three cities, includes 48 schools and serves nearly 23,500 students. The learning communities revolve around the high schools: Eastlake, Redmond, Lake Washington and Juanita.

The idea is to bring school principals together at all levels to discuss what the students in their neighborhoods need — and then to find ways to provide it. In a district that has added diversity through the decades, officials say it is crucial that each neighborhood find strategies that best fit its students' needs.

Jeff DeGallier, principal at Blackwell Elementary School in Sammamish, expects the plan to add focus and efficiency to the way schools use their resources and professional-development days. "I see this as a wonderful way to build a sense of common purpose, especially in an organization as large as the Lake Washington district," he said.

Each learning community will set priorities, review strategies and plan professional-development sessions. District officials will lead the groups through their monthly meetings, which began last month.

"We're asking principals to open the doors of their buildings and talk about the practices going on in their buildings and form a sort of support system," said Dan Phelan, assistant superintendent and the leader for the Juanita Learning Community.

The goal is to get teachers to swap strategies from classroom to classroom and building to building, he said. That kind of communication could bring an already high-achieving district to the next level, pulling more kids up to standard on state tests and other indicators of academic success.

At Finn Hill Junior High School in Kirkland, something similar to a learning community has been in place the past two years. Principal Victor Scarpelli said his staff spends time each year reviewing data and swapping strategies with local counterparts. "It takes time, but I think the time is well spent," Scarpelli said. "What we've found is that student achievement has gone up."

The district has worked in recent years to clarify expectations for students as they move through the system and to focus on how to meet each student's needs. This year's learning-communities concept is intended to build on that foundation. It also comes at a time of transition in the education world.

Both state and federal mandates are bearing down on local districts, demanding higher performance on standardized tests. The consequences for failure are significant. On the state level, if students — starting with the class of 2008 — don't pass all sections of the 10th-grade Washington Assessment of Student Learning in four attempts, they cannot graduate. On the federal level, theNo Child Left Behind law threatens schools with sanctions if they fail to make progress on standardized-test scores.

Because math scores are a weak point in the Lake Washington learning community, Mark Robertson said his group is likely to focus on that area of instruction this year.

"Math across the nation has been a real sore spot in public education, and it's no different in Lake Washington," said Robertson, principal at Lake Washington High School in Kirkland. "We still have a large number of students who are not passing that test."

It's also important that teachers use the same classroom terms throughout the grades, Robertson said; it's another thing that helps to smooth transitions and gives kids a sense of how classes connect. When students see the connection, he said, it makes success much easier.

"It gives them a strong understanding of direction — not only where they've been, but where they're going," said Robertson.

Cara Solomon: 206-464-2024