Sunnyside schools see improvement with turnaround program

Positive changes are being seen at four schools began participating in a turnaround program for struggling campuses, Sunnyside leaders say.

The district implemented the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Program at Challenger Middle School and Los Niños, Summit View and Rivera elementary schools using funds from a federal grant for school improvement.

After a semester of using the program’s approaches, school officials say teacher support systems have grown stronger and morale has risen. The schools also have adopted more data-driven practices.

“It provides a tremendous amount of support coupled with a lot of accountability,” said Laura Toenjes, the district’s director for school improvement.

All four schools are in the second phase of the turnaround program. It seeks to “empower system- and school-level leaders to achieve dramatic improvement in a set of persistently underperforming schools,” according to the partnership of the university’s business and education schools that developed the program.

The nearly three-year program involves four phases, the first of which is a planning period. The ultimate goal is to improve the school’s overall academic performance and school culture, which Sunnyside officials say will show further down the road.

The turnaround approach focuses on transforming leadership, using data to shape instruction and strengthening support systems for teachers, Toenjes said.

Lead teachers, who essentially act as coaches, mentors and role models to other teachers, lead teams of five to seven colleagues and meet regularly, she said. Toenjes meets weekly with the teachers and administrators of each school to track progress. Additional professional training is provided by the University of Virginia.

Instruction is crafted using data from interim assessments, such as end-of-unit quizzes, to determine exactly what each student needs help with to better address the gaps, she said.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

The turnaround approach also encourages schools to pick a few specific goals, rather than coming up with a large list of goals that any school won’t be able to realistically achieve.

For Challenger Middle School, the three goals it selected were: adopting student culture, teacher efficacy and data-driven collaboration and instruction, according to John Benavidez, that school’s principal.

The school received a “D” rating for the 2013-2014 school year from the Arizona Department of Education. Its students had consistently low state test scores and a low teacher-retention rate. That led to a lack of team building and continuity as well as discipline issues, he said.

After a full semester with the UVA program, Benavidez said he has already begun seeing positive changes among teachers and students.

An end-of-year survey with teachers showed that 100 percent of the teachers felt that the school administrators are supportive of their becoming better teachers. Ninety-seven percent said student services and academic coaches were also supportive.

The strengthening of the teachers’ support system is leading to fewer teachers wanting to leave the school after their first year, Benavidez said.

When he first came to the school in the 2014-2015 school year, he had to hire 30 new teachers, Benavidez said. The next year, he hired 15. Based on the survey, he’d have to hire only five new teachers in the next school year.

“We’re working really hard and diligently on these processes,” Benavidez said. “We’re very confident that we’ll see positive results out of this.”