Salem Middle School

 

School Information

School Name:  Salem Middle School
School Address:  6150 Old Jenks Road, Apex, NC 27523
School Phone:    919-363-1870
School Fax:  919-363-1876
Principal:  Allen Ellzey
Principal email:  aellzey@wcpss.net

 

Demographics

Number of Students:  1055
Percent Eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch:  5.7%
Percent of Limited English Proficient:  1%
Percent of Special Education: 13%
Racial/Ethnic Percentages:
- White  80%
- Black  11%
- Hispanic  3%
- Asian/Pacific Island  5.8%
- Other  .2%

 

Student Achievement Data:

Percent of Students Passing Statewide Assessment (Salem/DavisDrive/Wake County Public Schools)

Source of comparison data:
Davis Drive Middle School Davis Drive Middle School is another Wake County Public School that is located just over a mile down the road from Salem Middle. Both schools serve students from the same neighborhoods.
Davis Drive’s demographics are:
White: 72%
Black: 9.7%
Hispanic: 5.6%
Asian: 12%
Other: .2%
Economically Disadvantaged: 13%

	Grade 6 percentages: School/Comparison School/District
	2004-05	2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
Math	98/97.9/92.5	96.5/92.7/73.1	94.8/92.8/73.8	94.8/92.6/75.8
Reading	95.7/94.9/87.4	98.1/96/88	96.4/95.5/86.8	NA

	Grade 7 Percentages: School/Comparison School/District
	2004-05	2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
Math	97.5/96.7/88.5	90.4/88.3/72.6	97.2/89.2/73.3	95.6/89.8/73.6
Reading	97/96.7/89.9	97/94.8/90.7	98.6/95.4/91.6	NA
Writing	NA	86/72/59	91.8/76.5/68.5	91/84/68.7
Writing F+R Lunch Subgroup	NA	44/41/NA	68/35/NA	85/45/NA

	Grade 8 Percentages: School/Comparison School/District
	2004-05	2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
Math	96/94.1/87.7	92.1/88.9/71.8	94.3/84.2/73.5	93.5/89.7/74.7
Reading	97.4/95.6/91.4	98.1/95/91	97.9/93.3/91.3	NA
Algebra	>95/>95/NA	>95/>95/NA	100/>95/98.2	100/>95/98.2

 

 

Please comment on any aspect of the data that you believe is particularly significant.

There are several aspects of this data that I think are significant to note about Salem Middle School, a building in the Wake County Public School System (NC) that opened as a professional learning community in the fall of 2004. Perhaps most importantly, there was a precipitous drop in mathematics scores at our comparison school and at the county level between 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. A re-norming of our state’s mathematics exam resulted in nearly 20 percentage point drops across our county at sixth, seventh and eighth grade.

Our school, however, didn’t stumble. While we saw drops ranging from 2 points at the sixth grade level to 7 points at the seventh grade level, those gaps have now closed and our students are achieving at levels that are unparalleled in our state and in our county.

Also, notice that our seventh grade writing results—the only standardized writing exam given to North Carolina middle school students—are significantly better than the results of our comparison school and our county. We attribute this to a unified approach to writing across both our sixth and seventh grade language arts classrooms. Together, teachers are working collaboratively to design a writing curriculum that is intensive, age-appropriate and vertically aligned.

Particularly interesting are the scores of the free and reduced lunch students at Salem Middle school. Between 2004 and 2008, we saw a 41 percentage point improvement in the writing performance of these students, while the rates of growth at our comparison school have remained unchanged. This seems to support recent research that argues that an improved focus in instructional delivery across grade levels has the strongest impact on struggling students.

Finally, notice that our sixth grade reading results are consistently better than the results of our comparison school or district. Sixth graders have posed a unique challenge in our district over the past several years, showing a significant drop in reading performance after transitioning from elementary school to middle school. While other schools have struggled to find answers for this trend, our school has consistently posted strong reading results with this unique age level.

 

Please present additional information that indicates your efforts to build a professional learning community have had a positive impact on students and/or teachers.

Perhaps the best evidence that our efforts to build a professional learning community have had a positive impact on students and teachers are the results of our state’s most recent teacher working conditions survey, completed in the spring of 2008. Conducted biannually by the Center for Teaching Quality, this survey documents the presence of working conditions that are vital to ensuring that students succeed.

Since 2001—when North Carolina’s first Teacher Working Conditions Survey was delivered—clear connections have been found between teacher working conditions and student achievement. Perhaps most importantly, high quality teacher working conditions were the strongest predictors of meeting or exceeding growth expectations at the middle school level. Strong teacher agreement about the presence of trust in a middle school was a greater indicator of a school’s likelihood to exceed student growth expectations than any other school-based data factor—including student backgrounds, school size, teacher preparation levels and teacher turnover.

Our school has extraordinary survey results in two areas critical to building trust—school leadership and teacher empowerment. On a five point scale, our domain average for school leadership was 3.98—strongly positive and higher than a somewhat neutral district average of 3.79 and state average of 3.82. Our domain average for teacher empowerment was 3.48—also positive—compared to another neutral district average of 3.01 and slightly negative state average of 2.91.

More specifically, 72 percent of our teachers report being centrally involved in school decision-making—compared to 66 percent of teachers in our district—and 82 percent of our teachers agree that there is an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect in our building—compared with 68% of teachers in our district. 91% of our teachers report playing a large role in determining teaching techniques in our building—compared to 70% of the teachers in our district.

Our complete school report from the 2008 Teacher Working Conditions Survey can be found at: http://snipurl.com/3kqeq

We attribute this success to our attempt to build a professional learning community where teams of educators are working collaboratively—and are empowered by building administrators to make key decisions about teaching and learning. Shared decision making is the norm—rather than the exception—in our school, increasing teacher motivation and decreasing teacher turnover.

Our work has been recognized in two tangible ways. First, we were one of North Carolina’s 25 Most Improved Schools in 2004-2005. This award is given to schools based on the academic growth rates shown by individual students from one year to the next when compared to similar student populations. We were also named one of ten Governor’s Real DEAL schools in 2006-2007. This award is given to schools whose students have shown higher than expected growth rates when compared to similar student populations and who have extraordinary teacher working conditions.

(For more information about the findings of the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey, visit: http://www.teachingquality.org/twc/whatweknow.htm)

 

Please elaborate strategies you have found to be effective in the following areas:

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

Our school has been experimenting with two strategies for monitoring student learning on a timely basis. First, several of our teachers—recognizing a capacity gap in their assessment ability—have pursued training in strategies for data informed decision making and in easy methods of formative assessment in the classroom. These strategies are being implemented in individual classrooms and learning teams, and then are being shared across learning teams and between teachers.

We have also begun to use hand-held student responders in a few of our classrooms, gauging the potential impact that they might have on the ability to collect student learning data in a timely way. Our teachers have expressed frustration with the limited tools that they currently have for collecting data, and we see potential in digital tools as a possible solution for easing this frustration.

2. Creating systems of intervention to provide students with additional time and support for learning.

Our school has done two innovative things to provide students with additional time and support for learning. First, we’ve created what we call a “working lunch” period where students who are struggling can receive help from their core area classroom teachers. This period is assigned to students by teachers when they fail classroom assessments or when they have forgotten any homework assignments. Students can also choose to attend working lunch based on their own comfort with the content being covered in class.

To create this period, core area classroom teachers were relieved of all traditional “duties,” including supervising the lunchroom, hallways, or recess grounds. Those responsibilities have been assigned to other non-instructional personnel, freeing teachers to work with the students who need them the most. While teachers are not required to work with students during every lunch period, it is not uncommon to see groups of students in a teacher’s classroom 3 or 4 days of the week.

When students continue to struggle despite the support of their classroom teachers during working lunch periods, they can be recommended for a guided study class that is staffed by two certified classroom teachers who share one full time position. One of these teachers serves students struggling with mathematics and the other serves students struggling with reading.

This guided study period replaces one of the two electives that students in our school are able to take. Students who are enrolled in guided study must remain—due to school scheduling and grading constraints—in the class for one full quarter, but can rotate out of this additional support period at the end of a quarter if they have demonstrated mastery of required skills in reading and math.

In addition to these formal remediation opportunities, our teachers have demonstrated a willingness to think non-traditionally about what classrooms look like to create additional time and support for students. It is not uncommon to see students regrouped across the entire hallway, pairing students with different teachers and new instructional strategies. Teachers also regularly assume larger groups of students (40-50) for whole class lessons that are lecture or video based, freeing other teachers to provide remediation to smaller (5-10) groups of struggling students. This willingness to think non-traditionally is a direct result of our school’s commitment to ensuring the success of every child.

3. Building teacher capacity to work as members of high performing collaborative teams that focus efforts on improved learning for all students.

Our newest effort to build teacher capacity has been to repurpose a traditional instructional support position in a non-traditional way. We’ve divided that position into 6 separate parts and are providing some of our most accomplished classroom teachers with an additional month of employment.

Each faculty member uses this additional month to support the continued development of the learning teams in our building. Specifically, three of these teachers are skilled in the classroom uses of technology—both for engaging students in 21st Century learning experiences and for managing data collected at the classroom level. The other three teachers are skilled in strategies for differentiating learning.

During the course of the school year, these six teachers are offering professional development to our faculty by meeting with learning teams about individual challenges, by teaching model lessons in classrooms, and by leading sessions on topics of need during our scheduled staff training days.

What makes this model so effective is that each of the teachers chosen to receive an additional month of employment has a different social network within our school. They work at different grade levels and on different learning teams. They have different personalities and have built relationships in different places. By pairing them together in an “instructional leadership team,” we’ve been able to expand the influence of our instructional leaders and ensure that a consistent message makes it to every corner of our building.

It is also important to note that by repurposing this position, we’ve been able to offer some of our most accomplished educators a formal, paid leadership position within our school. For many, this opportunity was enough to keep them in the classroom working full time with students—an added benefit for our students and our school. We’ve essentially decided to value the knowledge and skill of our full-time practitioners—and to elevate that skill by creating part-time leadership positions beyond the classroom.

To create this position, however, we had to drop another non-traditional position that we were proud of known as a “PLC Coordinator.” Also created by repurposing an existing instructional resource teacher position, the PLC Coordinator was charged with providing time and attention to our learning teams. Our school was comfortable with giving up our instructional resource teacher because collaboration has become a natural part of “the way we do things.” As a result, learning team members serve as the primary instructional resource teachers for one another.

Our PLC Coordinator attended learning team meetings as a critical friend, providing suggestions for continued growth and identifying resources/training opportunities for individual teachers and entire teams. Recognizing that isolation in a learning community often exists between learning teams, the PLC Coordinator also served as a bridge in our building, identifying and amplifying teaming practices that are working.

What we found was that the impact of this position was limited because there was only one professional who was trying to build relationships with our entire faculty. It was simply impossible to find any one person who had a strong enough network in the diverse subject areas and grade levels of a middle school to be truly effective in this position. This limitation forced us to move away from a PLC Coordinator and towards the team of instructional leaders that we currently employ.

 

List awards and recognitions your school has achieved

In addition to being named one of North Carolina’s 25 Most Improved Schools and one of North Carolina’s 10 Real DEAL schools (mentioned earlier in this document), Salem Middle School has been an “Honor School of Excellence” every year since opening in 2004. Honor Schools of Excellence have over 90% of students performing on grade level and have made Adequate Yearly Progress.

Students at Salem Middle School have also met high growth targets every year since opening. These targets are set by the state and are based on individual student progress when compared to students of similar backgrounds and experiences. In 2004-2005, 17 percent of North Carolina schools were recognized as Honor Schools of Excellence. After standards were tightened for the recognition during 2005-2006, only 3 percent of North Carolina schools fell into this designation category.