DPS leaders analyze next steps for schools

Dayton Public Schools has multiple issues to address — including student achievement, its enrollment trend and teacher training — as it moves forward from Tuesday's vote to postpone further layoffs.

Superintendent Rhonda Corr called attention to the district’s five areas of focus, which roughly are literacy and math proficiency, graduation, attendance, making more than a year’s worth of growth, and a student-focused approach.

“If everyone is paying attention to the noise, we’re not going to be able to get to what matters the most, and that is student achievement,” she said.

The school board voted Tuesday not to lay off, demote or transfer dozens of instructional aides and non-classroom employees, saying it would revisit those issues this summer. After the meeting, Corr talked about immediate next steps for the district.

“As a chief in Chicago, I had a group of teacher-leaders and they were in essence the boots on the ground,” Corr said. “That’s something that’s lacking here. If you look at our scores — I’m a very data-driven, research-based person — we need people to come in here to help our teachers. They do need support. I totally agree with that.”

Corr said a teacher-leader model has not been formalized for DPS, but added that it could include using some existing veteran teachers in addition to hiring some new staff.

“We are going to do some recruiting … to try to identify (candidates). We want to look at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, so we can diversify our work staff. That’s really important,” Corr said.

“We want to improve the quality of instruction. We have some outstanding teachers doing really good work. And with that being said, we also have F’s on our report card.”

Teachers union President David Romick agreed with Corr on the desire for more teacher training, saying there is a need for districtwide training on dealing with behavioral issues in class, especially as DPS tries to suspend fewer students.

Also, the district changed its internal testing system this year (from STAR to NWEA), and Romick said teachers need to get more familiar with it. That's especially important as DPS tries to build on last year's student growth, which earned an "A" on the state report card.

“It was kind of a quick changeover, and not everybody had a chance to take advantage of the summer (training),” Romick said. “We do need more professional development on how to use the data generated by that NWEA test.”

Corr said students’ baseline results on those new NWEA tests this year were too low, calling it “not acceptable.” She said data that is reviewed regularly shows some schools “knocking it out of the park” while others are struggling.

Corr said there will be a variety of training programs offered, and touched on several other goals going forward, from making district leadership more visible in schools, to having more teachers with reading endorsements. She said DPS will audit its curriculum, and has asked the Council of Great City Schools to do an audit of the entire organization to provide comparative data as it moves toward more decisions this summer.

“All employees matter. I wish we could keep everybody,” Corr said. “But at the end of the day, we also have a responsibility to the community to be fiscally responsible. We lost just under 600 children. If you lose 577 clients and you work at CareSource or Ford or other places, that amounts to … right-sizing the organization.”

School board President Adil Baguirov was asked Tuesday whether there was a chance to avoid further staff cuts this summer, and said “absolutely” … if enrollment increases.

"We've been working hard in the past several years to make that happen," Baguirov said. "Part of it is academic improvement, others are some of the infrastructure improvements. We're trying to improve all of the operations, busing primarily, as well as implementing a district-wide 1-to-1 computer initiative.

“All of that, we hope will be able to reverse the trend of the past decades, and we’ll be able to finally, once again grow the population of DPS.”

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