A
Belief that Supports Our School Improvement Plan:
Our
SMI School Improvement Plan was created to specifically identify processes
to insure that the concerns and issues raised in our SIP discussions would and
could be addressed by the staff. It is the intent of the staff to create a SIP
that is not person specific but rather builds structures for the continuation
of school improvement far past the three focus years of this effort. We believe
that our ability to effectively collaborate with each other and our educational
partners is the cornerstone of our school improvement effort; it is included as
a goal in our SIP for that reason.
Our
School Improvement Process:
Our
School Improvement Plan or SIP was created by the entire Saddle Mountain
Intermediate School ( SMI ) staff with significant
input from the staff of the
The
FBI met initially with David Lantz, our assigned OSPI School Improvement
Facilitator (SIF), to review the OSPI recommended school improvement
process and then to create the timeline and internal structures that might best
meet the needs of our school. A school improvement team of five FBI members
that included Principal Rick Molitor was selected by the principal to attend
the January, 2003 OPSI Conference, a conference designed to both inform and
support the school improvement process across the State Of Washington. This
team was charged by the FBI and the staff to return with recommended goals for
our SMI plan, as well as a suggested timeline and structure designed to engage
all staff members and educational partners in our school improvement process.
The following suggestions were brought to the staff for their approval
following this meeting:
• Construct our plan around goals in
math, reading and collaboration with the themes of technology, writing,
parent/community involvement and supportive learning environment to be imbedded
in the strategies and action plans of the SIP.
• Create three committees, one for each
goal, and ask that all staff serve in some way on one of these committees. It
was recommended and approved to have one FBI Team member and one staff person
not on the FBI to co-chair each committee to insure best involvement of all
staff.
• Meet weekly after school as a
committee to write the strategies and then the action plans to support each
goal.
• Share the written progress made by
the committees on a weekly basis with staff to gather staff input and have each
FBI committee co-chairperson report progress back to the FBI each week. It was
intended that the FBI would then serve as the representative body who would
track SIP progress as a whole in order to insure the final plan would best
represent the desired parameters and vision of school improvement for our
building.
• Insure involvement in the planning of
our by both Wahluke district staff and through the involvement of parents on
our three committee teams.
In addition to the weekly school improvement committee
and FBI team meetings, substitutes were arranged on a weekly basis so both our
SIF and principal could meet with the two co-chairs of each goal committee to
provide feedback on the process, the product, and the scope of the work being
accomplished. Both principal and SIF worked with the committees to revise and
edit our SIP to insure a common voice and language to unify the wording of the
SIP. Finally, the staff was granted by Superintendent Dr. Bill Miller the chance to
have three ˝ day meetings at the end of March to review and approve the final
SIP found in this notebook. That concluded, the staff
then created an initial signature page to demonstrate the SMI commitment to our
plan. It is with pleasure that we share our work with all who take time to read
our plan and actively seek constructive feedback as we begin the implementation
process in school years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005.
The
Context for the Creation and Implementation of our SIP:
Our Saddle Mountain Intermediate School SIP is and will
always be a work in progress to be continually revised by the data we
consistently seek and assess that informs us about our progress in achieving
our three main school improvement goals. Our data is and will be compiled,
assessed and reported in four areas: achievement, demographic, perception and
contextual. This report contains hard copies of the achievement and demographic
data taken from the School Improvement Online Tool developed through OSPI,
which informed the work on our SIP. It is our intent to use this online tool in
the future to record and document our work in school improvement in all four
areas of data collection and assessment However, since this tool is still being
revised as of the date of this document, we have only utilized portions of it
in this initial report to be presented to OSPI and our educational partners as
of April 15, 2003. In addition, we have included in this document the
achievement, demographic, perception and contextual data gathered through the
following processes and sources:
• A written and oral review of our school as conducted by a
five-person educational audit team on
• An Educational Organization Performance Profile (referred
to as the EOPP in our SIP) prepared in conjunction with a comprehensive survey
administered and reported by the Center for Educational Effectiveness in
• A reading and math survey also administered and reported
by the Center for Educational Effectiveness.
• An all staff review of two school improvement publications
written by Kathleen Cotton and prepared under the auspices of the Northwest
Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Oregon entitled “ Research You Can
Use to Improve Results” and “ The Schooling Practices that Matter Most”. These
two documents assisted the staff to record the themes of school improvement
used to create our plan – a copy of our work is included in this report.
As you read our SIP, please note that several decisions
have yet to be made by the staff and the
Our District Calendar: Currently,
we are looking at the possibility of implementing late start each Monday at all
Wahluke schools for the purpose of garnering more scheduled time to implement
our SIP. Other considerations are the addition of more paid staff days for
school improvement work and the re-structuring of current time allocated for
meetings involving discussions about data and instruction. Our timeline will be
made more specific when we have our approved calendar.
Professional Development: Staff
development needs have been generally identified in our plan but we are
currently awaiting a decision as to the acceptance of our school as a “Reading
First” school, a decision that would come with directed staff development times
and processes. We will create a more specific professional development schedule
once we receive this decision since the Reading First staff development
training would receive top priority on the calendar and in our supporting budgets.
Of course, the adoption of the calendar will also facilitate more specificity.
Resources Available: Funding
sources and amounts keep our plan from being more specific at this time. We
have identified general sources with some confidence but will need to wait and
see how much will be available to us from all of our grants sources, school
improvement funds, and a slashed district budget. We are confident that the
people resources identified are available to us – specific names will appear
next fall on our plan as we know who staff will be both in our building and in
organizations such as OSPI, ESD 105, etc.
Who Is Responsible: This spring
and summer, the SMI staff will attempt to clarify the exact structures we will
use to implement our SIP. We have decided that we want to create a
committee-based plan to insure all-staff and community participation but still
need to discuss how committee position are filled, who chairs those committees,
and whether or not to use the current FBI as the overall school improvement
decision making body tasked with the coordination of our efforts. We also
intentionally desired to list positions rather than names at this time to
insure that our plan was not person specific but that we have the processes in
place to insure program implementation.
All revisions made to our written plan will be done by
the SIF on a monthly basis as we also monitor the progress we are making on our
action plans. Eventually, we hope that this monitoring process can be
documented using the Online School Improvement Tool.