Join the conversation

Principal Stephanie Smith of Seaford Middle School has seen the highs and lows of school reform. She has seen her school shake off the stigma it bore as a school "in need of improvement." (Delaware named her its 2008 Principal of the Year for her role in that school's remarkable transformation.) She has seen the school sustain its students' performance despite the fact that many more now live in poverty than did just a few years ago. She has even seen the school begin to stem the tide of its highest-performing students into a neighboring charter school.

But now she worries that the school might not be able to keep clearing the bar that No Child Left Behind sets higher every year. And she faces the prospect of slipping back into "needs improvement" status less than a decade after her school emerged from it.

We recently spoke with Smith, who told us the remarkable story of her school's triumphs and struggles in the era of No Child Left Behind.

Public School Insights: What kind of a school is Seaford Middle School?

Smith: It is a grade six through eight middle school. We are the only middle school in our school system. We have four feeder elementary schools and we feed into one high school. We have about 750 students.

Seaford is a demographically diverse school. We really don’t have a majority population anymore—we run about 40% African-American and Caucasian populations, with a Hispanic population as well. We are 71% free and reduced price lunch. That number has gone up drastically, probably since you last got information on our school. We are about 21% special ed.

Public School Insights: What do you think prompted the rise in free and reduced price lunch numbers?

Smith: I think just the status of the economy. Our community—the city of Seaford and its outlying areas—has been given the title of the poorest community in our state. I think that it's a direct result of everything that is going on. Our numbers have just gone up this year.

Public School Insights: Have you noticed an impact of that demographic change on the work that you are doing at the school?

Smith: Not, I'll be honest, as much as one might think. One of the things that we've been proud of is that with our free and reduced price lunch students and our population that is not free and reduced price lunch, achievement has pretty much been balanced. With 71% in that population, we do things the same for everybody and it seems to be working for that population for us.

Public School Insights: You have said that you are a work in progress. But you have had some good progress—you have had pretty dramatic increases in school performance in recent years. Could you tell me more about that?

Smith: We have. We were blessed that we had the highest gains in mathematics test scores in our state a few years ago. We also went up drastically in our African-American population.

But right now we are hitting kind of a plateau. And of course the numbers we need to meet AYP are going up. So we are trying all the strategies that we have and we are still making gains—we have not slipped behind—but our gains need to pick up because the target is being moved on us.

Our focus right now is really two things. We did miss our AYP predictors this past year in two areas— African-American mathematics, where we have had such gains in over the past few years, and special education mathematics. In special education, over the past few years we've been able to meet Safe Harbor [a certain percentage of growth], but we did not meet it last year in mathematics. We grew, but not to the extent where they would give us Safe Harbor. So that cell hurt us a little this past year.

Public School Insights: Do you feel that these results are prompting useful work within the school?

Smith: They are. We use data all the time for what we do. We practice a distributed leadership model here, and the way that we distribute the work and how things are done all depends on the data we get back. So now we know the areas we need to focus on, and those are the areas where when we get new resources—we are actually going to get some school improvement resources this year because of our change in status—we will focus them on the areas that need them.

Public School Insights: So do you feel that overall and in the long term federal policy has been helping Seaford?

Smith: It’s been helping in the sense that we are growing and that things are looking better here. Hurting in the sense that when you put ratings in the paper and compare us to other area middle schools, we don’t look as good. But I had someone at our Department of Education tell me the other day “Keep doing what you're doing—you are doing the right thing and you're moving.” But when you put us all apples to apples, and we don't all have apples, it just doesn't look the same in the paper. That's what's been difficult.

We have a charter school here in our area, and we deal with a little bit of flight. I lose—and I've reduced the number drastically over the past few years—about 21 kids a year who choose to go to the charter school. That school is predominately white and, despite using a lottery system, filled with very good students—the children all have fours and fives on our state test, out of a five-point rubric. So I deal with that each year as well—losing that skim off the top.

But we have kept a lot of those students too. And we are to the point where I can predict right now who is going to go, based on siblings and based on families. I could stand on my head in front of the school and I don't know that I would change their minds. But I am able to predict it.

And I think that we are making an impact as far as the reputation of our school in our community. It really wasn't that great when I first came here, and we've been able to do quite a bit in the past five years to change that.

Public School Insights: You mentioned earlier that despite the fact that your school did not make AYP this last year, the state education department told you to just hang tight and do what you are doing.

Smith: Yes. I think the perception right now is that most schools are going to be under restructuring very shortly. I know that is the case in Delaware. But we really don't have clear plans on what that means.

I hate to say this, but the middle school has really been ugly stepchild of the district for a while. It was deep in the school improvement process years ago. But we did get out. We got out and we've shaken that stigma off ourselves, which has helped a great deal as far our reputation is concerned. We have received a lot of recognition and some big awards over the past especially three years. We are going to present at two national conferences this year. We were a Breakthrough School last year for NASSP. I was honored as principal of the year for our state. So a lot of things have come around in the past couple of years that have brought more attention to our school as people are recognizing that this is working.

Public School Insights: You mentioned that more and more schools will be slipping under the AYP bar. Do you have any concerns that it could happen to Seaford, and that you would have to restructure your restructuring, as it were?

Smith: I do have that concern. As the bar goes up and we move closer to 2014, when the goal is 100% proficiency...I know the efforts that we are doing here and I see the kids that we have. And I know that they are not all going to be at 100%, especially some of my special education population.

We are also getting a new state test. This is our last year with our current state test, and so we do not even know what's coming for our kids to be assessed on. It is still out to bid. We just know that it is going to be computerized, and it is supposed to give us different feedback than we have gotten in the past. But there is a lot of uncertainty about that. So yes, it is a concern. Like I said, we are blessed that we were able to get out. We are one of only a few schools to get out of school improvement in our state. Our school has been looked at as a leader in a number of areas, especially in distributive leadership. But we are still chasing a moving target.

Public School Insights: Tell me more about the distributed leadership model at Seaford.

Smith: We operate under a theme system each year. This year our theme is “Paving the Path” and, because the road to success is always under construction, our staff teams are construction crews with crew chiefs. We do everything under this theme concept, and as a matter of fact I'm presenting at the national middle school conference about promoting your vision through themes. So we form our construction crews around the different areas that need to be addressed in our school. And for example, our parent and community involvement construction crew looks at their data, brainstorms ideas for ways to improve it and acts on those ideas. It does not fall all on my plate—they work on it.

Each team’s crew chief is part of the school leadership team. When we have school leadership team meetings they report out where they are on the goals and the action plan for their crew. Then we as a leadership team have discussions and make suggestions about how we proceed. The school leadership team meetings are not run by me. There are some issues on which I will be the facilitator, but otherwise a teacher will run those meetings. And they have the ability to make decisions based on the information that we have. We all decide together.

For example, last year we had to cut staff. We as a group sat and decided where. And in the end even our social studies department chair said, “Okay, I'm going to give up a teacher in social studies so we can do this based on the data.” So we make those kinds of decisions together. Our staff deals with tough issues, so it is not “me” doing things, it is “us.” And that is a big thing. When I talk about the school, everything is “ours” and nothing is “mine.” Just changing that one word makes a big difference as far as staff is concerned.

Public School Insights: That is quite different from the person from on high eliminating positions.

Smith: Yes. That eliminates a lot of problems for me that other schools may have, because decisions don't just come pouring out of my office. They are something that we've done together, so there is no sense of the unfairness that somebody did something to somebody that other schools may deal with. It is a collaborative effort. And that group that I mentioned is a big group. It has a representative from each department—the department chairs, who interviewed for those positions—and elected, at-large representatives, so each year the staff can change who is on the team. It also contains parents, a paraeducator representative and our nurse.

Public School Insights: Some schools in the turnaround process might have a sense that they are doing the right things, but in that first year they do not see the test scores increase. If you had not seen scores go up in that first year, are there interim measures that you are doing the right things that can give you confidence that you might see improvements in the following years?

Smith: There are. For example, looking at how kids are progressing. We have drastically reduced our retention rate, which is something we are really proud of. It is not because we changed what it takes to pass, and it is not because we've made things easier. We have just done things to build in support for kids so that they do not get to that point. Last year, we retained six kids out of 750. When I first got here, we retained probably 40 or 50. So that is something that we can look at and be proud of.

I would say looking at your own assessments as well. Here, our state assessment is a one-shot deal in March, and we do not get information back until the end of May, when the kids are almost gone. So we do common assessments across our math, science and social studies departments. Language arts is working on them. We also just started using the MAPS assessment--Measures of Academic Progress. This assessment gives us some data as we go on through the school year. Even if progress does not show on that one-shot state test, then we still know that we've made it. Celebrating all those pieces and sharing all that data with staff is important. Each year, they need to see this information so that they can see changes.

I'll tell you the other big thing I noticed when I first became a principal—staff need to know the goals. There were a lot of staff members who had no idea what the goals on the district school improvement plan were. They knew that we wanted test scores to go up, but not the specific measures and goals that we had outlined that we were supposed to meet. So my first year I ended up changing the format of department meetings so staff had to report out based on school improvement plan. What did we as a department do to increase parental involvement? What did we as a department do to increase student academic achievement? So the first year they were trained that “These are the goals” and the areas we are focusing on. Now that it's become commonplace to them, we can move on and do different things.

Public School Insights: Are there any questions I should have asked you but didn't, or a final lesson you want to leave us with?

Smith: The biggest thing for us was changing culture and moving to the idea of the team. That was the only way we were going to tackle the issues. So I moved classrooms around and made people new neighbors. For example, math is altogether in one wing. The teachers are able to share back and forth. I give them time and opportunities to do that. And I think that the biggest thing is recognizing what you have in your staff and figuring out ways to use that.

Public School Insights: So you're looking at your internal resources, and then giving them the capacity to do their best.

Smith: What do they need? If my staff members feel that they need something, then it is my job to figure out a way to get it for them. They have to have what they need to tackle the problems we have to deal with for the kids.