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Story posted August 6, 2009. Results updated August 2012.

Results:

• In 2012, Vallivue was recognized as a NASSP Breakthrough School.
• In 2011, 87% of 6th graders reached or exceeded proficiency in reading, up from 73% in 2008
• 57% of 7th graders did so in science, up from 35% in 2008
• 80% of 8th graders did so in language useage, exceeding the state average of 71%
  
• In math, the percentage of 8th graders scoring at or above proficient exceeded the state average of 80% by 10 points, reaching their all time high (so far) of 90% [math proficiency rates hovered around 50% prior to 2005]
  

On any given day in one of Debbie Watkins’s seventh-grade math classes you might find a student standing under a giant lightbulb, calling a parent, family member, or guardian on an old white telephone attached to the wall. Occasionally, the entire class will turn to watch the student make the call. Other times they barely notice, it’s become so commonplace.

It may sound like a punishment, but it’s actually a unique reward. A student gets to turn the light bulb on when they’ve finally demonstrated mastery of a difficult concept, typically one that has been causing them grief for several weeks. Then they get to call an adult of their choosing to share the good news.

It’s a small victory—one little step on the ladder of improvement—but the phone calls can be emotional moments. Once in a great while a student chokes back tears. Other times, they high-five or strut to the phone as if they’ve just scored a touchdown. More often, they play it cool but beam with pride. One can imagine the adult on the other end of the line, doing the same.

“These kids love to call home,” says Watkins. “They love to be proud of themselves. That’s something that’s rare in all aspects of their lives, so when we can give them those little success stories it’s huge for them.”

These lightbulb moments and celebratory phone calls are indicative of several things at the grade 6–8 Vallivue Middle School, just outside Caldwell, Idaho. First, dealing with students’ emotional needs is a constant reality here, as it is in many middle schools. Second, the school has its share of struggling students who come from poverty or other disadvantaged circumstances and have not had a lot of success or praise in their young lives. And third, the entire staff at Vallivue is dedicated to creating an emotional and academic safety net for these at-risk students. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the school’s math intervention classes.

In the past three years Vallivue has created an intense “double dose” math intervention process that gives the lowest achieving students a second chance at academic success. Based on the data, it’s working.

Prior to the 2004–2005 school year, the percentage of Vallivue students meeting math proficiency on the statewide assessment hovered around 50 percent, well below the state average. Since then, the school has made big gains, raising its proficiency, most recently, to 72 percent. During that same time the statewide average for math proficiency went up only five percentage points.

The school’s improvement is less dramatic in reading, but there, too, it has improved at a rate double that of the state’s. Vallivue was recently a “showcase school” at the statewide Title I conference, even though it has never made adequate yearly progress (AYP). Almost no middle schools in Idaho have consistently made AYP, especially those with demographics similar to Vallivue’s. Last year the school missed AYP by only a few percentage points in a single subject area in one subgroup. They’re almost there.

The Fallen-Through-The-Cracks Kids
Vallivue Principal Rod Lowe jokingly refers to the middle school years as the black hole. “Grades often drop, emotions run really high, everything goes a little haywire,” he says. “You’ve got parents saying ‘This isn’t the kid I raised!’ I tell them: ‘If you figure it out, write a book, because you’re the exception.’”

More than anything, says Watkins, students feel confused and out of control. “They’re in between everything: youth and adulthood and everything that goes with it,” she says. “They have no idea what they’re doing. They’re intensely self-conscious. Hardly anyone feels good about themselves in seventh grade.”

For many of Vallivue’s 720 students there are other pressures as well. The Caldwell-Nampa area is a semi-rural, semi-suburban area just west of Boise. The Vallivue School District serves the county area between the two towns, and despite the proximity to Boise, agriculture is still the main industry here. There is a sizable population of Latino families who do seasonal work, and many others who struggle with rural poverty, as reflected in the 55 percent of Vallivue Middle School students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. A 30 percent mobility rate also speaks to the number of families who jump back and forth among Caldwell, Nampa, Boise, and as far afield as Mexico, looking for work.

By the sixth grade such socioeconomic pressures have already taken a toll on many students. Add puberty to the equation and it’s not uncommon to see an academic free-fall.

These are the students that Watkins calls “the fallen-through-the-cracks kids,” and “the hardest ones to reach.” Typically, they are not students with learning disabilities, but simply those that fell behind early and never caught up.

“If you never have success at something, you start to give up,” says Watkins. “These are students who fell farther and farther behind, and then you start to see behavior problems because they’re not engaged. Before long they’ve become the troublemakers and the underachievers—the ‘worst of the worst.’”

These are also the students most likely to drag down a school’s test scores and keep it from making AYP. That equation may seem cynical, but it’s not. The standards and accountability movement has given many schools the resources and urgency to address these “problem kids” in a more direct and intense way than ever before. That has been the case at Vallivue, and it is starting to pay off—in improved test scores, yes, but also in brighter futures for many students who were heading down a dark road.

You Have to Believe
Vallivue’s approach to helping these struggling students is not unusual or groundbreaking, but like any other instructional strategy it can be done poorly or done well—it’s all in the details. In the simplest terms, the math “double dose” is given to the lowest scoring students in all three grade levels, 6–8. In the sixth and seventh grades they choose the bottom 48 students, based on assessments given the previous spring. By eighth grade many of those students have been brought up to grade level, which means there are fewer students in the program.

In order to keep class sizes to 16 or fewer, there is a full-time intervention math teacher for all three grade levels: Christin Barkl teaches sixth grade, Watkins seventh, and Bruce Johnson eighth. Each has three 51-minute intervention classes in the morning and three in the afternoon. Students in the program must give up an elective and take the class twice a day, one period in the morning and one in the afternoon. Because of scheduling, students don’t stay with the same group of peers from morning to afternoon, but in every other way the program strives for consistency and structure.

“These students don’t like change at all,” says Watkins. “This has been a struggle for them. They often have a lot of change in their personal lives, and you have to make up for some of that. We put a lot of emphasis on having clear expectations and specific requirements to stay in the program.”

A key to the program’s success has been to choose the best teachers and to match them to the grade level with which they are most comfortable. “You have to put the right people in the right places,” says Lowe. “In the past some schools made the mistake of assigning the least qualified teachers to the most at-risk students. We do the exact opposite. These are three of the best teachers we have.”

It has taken some tinkering to find just the right fit. In the three years the school has had the program Johnson and Watkins have switched grade levels and a different teacher has filled the third slot each year.

“It takes a certain kind of teacher to do this,” says Instructional Specialist Brenda Hogg. “You have to be very confident and have a lot of self-esteem and know exactly what you’re doing, because these kids will test you at first. And then, you have to believe that you can help them and that they can learn. Not all teachers truly believe that, deep down.”

Another key, says Lowe, is to build positive relationships. “I really encourage all of our teachers to be relational, but that’s especially true for the intervention teachers,” he says. “They have to know how to connect to these kids.”

According to Watkins that connection has to happen from day one. “With the intervention students, if I don’t build a relationship with them right off the bat, I don’t have them at all. It’s got to happen immediately,” she says.

Step inside any of the three teachers’ classrooms and you’ll see how they create those connections. All students are treated equally and held to the same high standards, but each is also treated as an individual. The teachers are constantly working to differentiate instruction and they address individual learning styles by incorporating strategies from the sheltered instruction observation protocol (SIOP), in which the entire staff has been trained. The small class sizes also ensure that each student gets one-on-one attention when they need it.

Building a Foundation
The other major key to the program’s success is the curriculum itself. Hogg calls it a “spiraling” curriculum that focuses on developing students’ understanding of individual math concepts, one-by-one, until they have built a firm foundation of skills and knowledge. All three teachers use the same language to teach the concepts and they repeatedly refer to previous lessons in a kind of back-and-forth weave that draws on students’ growing knowledge base.

Repetition and consistency are again part of routine. Each new concept is taught three times. First, the concept is introduced “cold”—without explanation—while students take notes. When the concept is reintroduced a second time, the students try to solve equations using only their notes. After they’ve tried, the concept is then explained in more depth, on the chalkboard or overhead projector, with reference to the students’ own notes as well as to related concepts they have already mastered. Finally, the teacher and students go over problems in repetition, often in a kind of rapid call-and- response, with the teacher providing assistance only as necessary. Johnson, for one, uses whiteboards during these sessions, so that students can quickly hold up their answers.

During the course of the school year the students will learn approximately 200 individual math concepts, each of which builds on the one before it. “They get each concept at least three times a week, in its entirety,” says Watkins. “And then it goes on the board with the master list of concepts. We just keep adding to the bottom of the list and reteaching, reteaching, building that knowledge base.”

Shanelle, a student in Johnson’s eighth-grade classes says the methodical approach has made it far easier to understand math. “In other classes I’ve had they just went through it really fast, from the book,” she says. “But Mr. Johnson’s teaching methods are really good. He does problems on the board and shows you what to do, what steps to follow, one problem at a time. The way he puts things makes it very easy to learn. And then he makes sure everybody gets it before he moves on.”

Jacob, a student in Watkins’ class says the instructional approach makes him feel more appreciated and less like a face in the crowd. “Ms. Watkins works with me one-on-one a lot,” he says. “She doesn’t give up on me when I don’t understand something. She just keeps trying until I learn it.”

Watkins’ belief in Jacob has paid off. He was previously performing at the “basic” level, or below grade-level proficiency, but is now testing out at advanced for seventh grade. Next year he’ll be able to return to the general eighth-grade math class.

The number of intervention students who reach proficiency is impressive, especially considering that many of them come in well below grade level. On average, about 40 percent of the sixth- and seventh-graders will move out of intervention before the eighth grade. As a result, Johnson’s classes average only about 10 students each. Last year, Johnson moved 78 percent of those students into proficiency and out of intervention.

The intervention classes are now among the most popular in the school. “It’s a testament that intervention is working here when I have kids in the hall constantly saying, ‘I want to be in your math class. How can I get in your math class? It’s fun!’’’ says Watkins. “They’re hearing about it from their fellow students—kids that have been unsuccessful, academically, their entire lives, and now they’re enjoying being in a math class twice a day and giving up an elective to do it.”

The math intervention classes are only one part of a school-wide strategy to help Vallivue’s most at-risk students, but their effect has been profound. Not only have they contributed to the school’s big jump in achievement scores, they have also helped get many students’ lives back on track.

“This can be such a positive thing for them,” says Watkins. “They’re really good kids who have a lot to offer, they just don’t know it yet. My goal is that, by the time they leave my class they’re not only up to grade level in math, but they’ve also started to see the positive in themselves and to think of themselves as successful. That’s what’s going to carry them through high school and into more meaningful lives.”

November 2011 Update: Despite serving a significantly larger population of free- and reduced-price lunch students than the state as a whole, the school continues to perform at or above state averages on standardized tests in math and other subjects. See Vallivue’s page on Greatschools.org for more details.

For additional information, please contact:
Rod Lowe
Principal, Vallivue Middle School
rlowe@vallivue.org

This story was originally published in the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory’s Spring-Summer 2009 Edition of Northwest Education.

Citation: Bracken Reed. A Second Chance at Success. Northwest Education, Spring-Summer 2009, Volume 14, Number 3, p 10-13.

Photos by Bracken Reed

Copyright © 2009, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.