In case you missed the PTA meeting on April 8, 2014, here is the text of the speech that I delivered:
Welcome. I am pleased to announce that Durham
Elementary school is now an IB World School.
In receiving our authorization, Durham is the sixth school in HISD to
offer the Primary Years Programme, joining Harvard, Northline, River Oaks,
Roberts, and Mark Twain Elementary Schools.
This accomplishment is the culmination of years of work by the staff,
parents and community. I want to
especially recognize Ms. Williams, who has worked tirelessly to keep Durham on
track through multiple principals and a great deal of pain and suffering.
The original
intent of this talk was for me to share with you some information about where
we are as a school community and where we are planning to go from here. I want to take a minute to break down Durham
by the numbers:
- 21 - The average number of students in a class this year, compared with 23 last year - even with an increase in enrollment we have been able to keep our classes smaller by using our resources more strategically
- 547 – The number of students enrolled at Durham this year. This is an increase of about 6% from the previous school year.
- 120 – The number of hours teachers have spent this year in collaborative planning meetings. This includes time spend planning for instruction and learning about new teaching strategies so as to ensure are staff is the best in the district.
- 315 – The number of hours our teachers have worked to provide enrichment and tutorial opportunities to our students after school. This included classes for struggling students through spring break.
- 79,000 – This is the number of dollars that we have spent this year to refresh our technology - including interactive white boards in every classroom, 60 new computers around the campus and 2 iPads in each Pre-K classroom.
As the great weather indicates we
have entered, what others call Spring, but what we, here in Texas, call the
season of testing. My personally
philosophy has always been that great instruction will ensure that students
are successful in life and successful on tests.
This ideal is what we have worked to implement this year.
If you have ever taken a test prep
class, such as the SAT or GRE prep, your instructor took time to teach you
about the test. Is it better to guess or
leave questions blank? Should you start
at the end and work forward or start with the beginning? This is genre of testing. It is important to teach it, but it should
never be the curriculum. No matter the
grade level, from August to March, we should be solving open-ended math
problems and we should be reading authentic texts such as novels, magazine
articles and websites. How many of you
solved a math problem at work today that had multiple choice answers? Did any of you curl up with a good STAAR
reading passage last night before you went to bed? We do our children a disservice when we teach
them that math comes with multiple choice answers and that reading comes in
short passages followed by questions.
The process of elimination is NOT a state standard. As you may guess, this is a paradigm shift
for some teachers, who have been rewarded with bonuses for getting students to
pass the state test. But those times are
gone. We now live in an era where
student achievement is measured by growth and our tests assess a students’
ability to think.
During many of those
120 hours mentioned earlier, teachers were busy writing challenging and engaging lessons; they were learning how to let go so that our
classrooms can be more student-centered; and they were working to use
technology more effectively to support teaching and learning. Receiving our IB authorization is just the
first fruit of our work this year. Once
we are through the season of testing, we will receive a rating from the state
that will tell us how well we did in helping our students to grow. No doubt there will be much more to do and I
will update you when our scores come in from TEA.
Now I want to talk about our plans for next year. I expect applause with this - we will not have early dismissal on Wednesdays. To ensure that
teachers have enough time to continue the great planning work that we started,
we will have 55 minute enrichment classes. Also, we are going to have clubs every Friday during the last hour of the day,
to ensure that our students have meaningful enrichment opportunities. Every staff member will host a club and
students will get to choose what club they want to be in. This is a great opportunity for our staff to
share their gifts with our students. For
example, Ms. Ursula, in the office, is going to sponsor choir for the intermediate
students. She has her own CD and is an
amazing singer. Mr. Mender is a scratch
golfer, who is working on a plan to teach golf to students who are
interested.
Next year our regular
enrichment offering will be library, art, PE and Mandarin. Both the art teacher, Ms. Jones and the
librarian, Ms. Welker, will be full time.
We will offer music on Friday through clubs and also through our
after school program. We are adding a
full time reading interventionist, who is bilingual so she will be able to work
with English and Spanish speaking students.
We are also adding a second grade class and a fourth grade class so as
to ensure that our class sizes stay manageable.
All of these additions are possible because
we have seen a large increase in the number of magnet applications. We currently have waiting lists at every
grade level and I’m hoping that we reach our capacity of 600 next year. This magic mark should force the district to
stop using Durham as the “cap” school.
As a cap school, Durham has been required to take overflow students who
enroll late at nearby campuses. Because
this type of transfer is only good for one year, being a cap school increases
our mobility rate making it difficult to build sustainable change and a strong
community.
I hope you share in my excitement
about the changes in store for next year.
On a personal note, I want to
reassure all of you that I remain committed to Durham. I bought a house in December, 4 miles from
the school. I love coming to work every
day and I am extremely excited about this path we are all on, as a
community of learners.
