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Category 2
Selected in 2019
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Grades: 6 - 12
School Setting: rural
Town Population: 1
Student Enrollment: 331
Student Demographics:
Black/African American: 0.3%
Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:13
White/Caucasian: 92.4%
Hispanic: 2.4%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
Asian: 0.9%
Native American: 2.7%
Other: 1.2%
% Reduced Lunch: 54%
% ELL Learners: 0.3%
Founded: 1938 -
PRINCIPAL:
Chad Prewitt -
CONTACT:
801 7th Street
Davenport, WA 99122
509-725-4021
cprewitt@davenportsd.org
Davenport Middle/Senior High School
Davenport, WA
Imagining, Empowering, and Creating, Endless Possibilities for Every Student, Every Day!
- Describe specific programs in place to ensure that families are involved in the success of your school and students.
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Our school values our partnership with families and realizes communication is a crucial component in this relationship. We use Skyward School Management Software, so parents, students, and educators can access information like grades, attendance, and advancement toward graduation requirements. We invite parents to two pre-scheduled conference opportunities: arena-style parent/teacher conferences in the fall and student-led conferences in the spring. Bi-weekly, mid-term, and quarterly grade reports are mailed home to communicate student grades. IEP meetings, 504 meetings, and other face-to-face meetings are scheduled to plan, monitor, and revise education plans for students. These meetings include parents and educators who work together in the best interest of the student. Quarterly newsletters from the district keep parents and all community members abreast of happenings in the district. Other conferences, emails, phone calls, school-website postings, texts, and mailings are also utilized throughout the year to foster open communication. Our district has a parent group that supported our MS/HS by giving school pride t-shirts to our middle school students and donating reward items for our PBIS system.
- Describe the most successful activity your school has initiated to strengthen ties to your community.
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Davenport School District is at the heart of our community, and people here take great pride in being a gorilla. Our partnership with parents and the community has a few key highlights. Our school hosts an annual back-to-school open house for students and parents prior to the start of school to build our partnership. We also host “Night of Intrigue” events where food is served and a rotating-session format shares information with parents about new course offerings, instructional strategies, and curriculum highlights. Students even help “teach” some of the sessions! We invite parents and community partners to enjoy student presentations and performances. Business owners and employees from a wide range of career paths also provide their insights to students at our annual Career Fair. We are very transparent and invite our community to be a part of the educational process. This relationship helps our student body thrive through the programs we offer.
- Describe your philosophy of school change or improvement.
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Davenport School District has adopted the mantra “Imagining, Empowering, and Creating, Endless Possibilities for Every Student, Every Day!” This bold call to action is part of the school’s culture, driving our collective efforts and use of resources to meet student needs. Our leadership philosophy can be described as “all hands on deck” to help students have options and opportunities for their futures. The District’s leadership team consists of the superintendent, middle school/high school principal, elementary principal, and four classroom teachers. This team is responsible and accountable for everything that happens in the district and reports to the school board monthly. The administration and school board provide weekly Professional Learning Community time, empowering and supporting teacher focus on instructional practices, program implementation, and student achievement. The high level of trust and resulting autonomy between the board, administrative team, and teachers has allowed the Davenport School District to implement policies to help the school thrive in recent years.
- What are your school’s top two goals for the next year?
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Our school and district have once again chosen to participate in the Washington School Leadership Academy to address the problem of practice we have identified in our district: How can we implement and monitor rigorous, grade-level core instruction, curriculum, and assessments, so our system has fewer students in need of reading intervention and ALL students grow? By working with our leadership coach to determine and implement an action plan, we will work to solve challenges our system is currently facing, so we can improve our craft and better meet our students’ needs. One of the primary aspects of our early action plan is to have all teachers participate in walkthroughs in each other’s classrooms and follow a debrief protocol to facilitate the identification of effective instructional strategies and high-levels of rigor that are present in classrooms. We will then incorporate whole-staff professional development to replicate and increase effective practices across our system to increase student learning.
Our school is working to grow and improve our skills center programs and CTE department to create effective and viable alternative pathways to graduation from the Davenport Middle/High School. Implementing our new CASE programs and continuing to improve our fledgling Certified Nursing Assistant and Construction Trades programs will be a priority next year.
- What is the single most important factor in the success of your school that others could replicate?
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Our most instrumental practice has been our dedication to creating an intentional, measureable, coordinated approach to system improvement, so we can impact every student’s growth. Through our participation in Washington State Leadership Academy (WSLA) in 2014, we began a journey. Our WSLA mentor guided us through the Cycle of Inquiry, focusing our attention and efforts, so we could identify our problem of practice, plan how to address it, monitor our progress, and adjust our efforts to gain measurable results. This framework has transformed several areas in our school.
Our strategy was instrumental in our systemic improvement in ELA. We gathered and utilized assessment data in new, more informative ways to determine our K-12 system did not have a way to intentionally meet the needs of our tier-two struggling readers. As a result of our findings, we modified our course schedules and revamped RTI to provide more ELA support to these students. The results speak for themselves: In our first year, 86% of our 7th graders who received extra help in our new support course showed growth in their state test results compared to the previous year, as did 100% of grade 8 and 85% of grade 10 students. In the second year of implementation, 83% of grade 7, 85% of grade 8, and 100% of grade 10 students who were served in the support course showed growth. Our efforts have continued, as has the growth. In 2018, 100% of our grade 10 class met the graduation proficiency level on the state test, meaning no student would need to retake the test to meet that state graduation requirement. Our intentional, systemic approach has led to measurable student achievement. We recognize the value of WSLA, so we have rejoined the program for a fourth round in order to address a new problem of practice as we strive to keep improving our system.
Coordinated efforts connected to data-informed decisions have also helped shape our school’s attainment and use of a GEAR UP Grant to support our most at-risk students while enriching our school experience for the student body as a whole. Targeting students with exposure to careers and colleges, providing emotional support, and connecting students and families to resources complements our overall 6-12 efforts.
WSLA can be credited with scaffolding and making our efforts more effective, so every student can grow and succeed. Spreadsheets and data are no longer intimidating, but instead help us read or tell our students’ stories, so we are better equipped to ensure happy endings. Success had always been the desired outcome, but data-informed, coordinated, intentional efforts have become the norm to achieving it.
- Describe the program or initiative that has had the greatest positive effect on student achievement, including closing achievement or opportunity gaps, if applicable.
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Our most instrumental practice has been our dedication to creating an intentional, measureable, coordinated approach to system improvement, so we can impact every student’s growth. Through our participation in Washington State Leadership Academy (WSLA) in 2014, we began a journey. Our WSLA mentor guided us through the Cycle of Inquiry, focusing our attention and efforts, so we could identify our problem of practice, plan how to address it, monitor our progress, and adjust our efforts to gain measurable results. This framework has transformed several areas in our school.
Our strategy was instrumental in our systemic improvement in ELA. We gathered and utilized assessment data in new, more informative ways to determine our K-12 system did not have a way to intentionally meet the needs of our tier-two struggling readers. As a result of our findings, we modified our course schedules and revamped RTI to provide more ELA support to these students. The results speak for themselves: In our first year, 86% of our 7th graders who received extra help in our new support course showed growth in their state test results compared to the previous year, as did 100% of grade 8 and 85% of grade 10 students. In the second year of implementation, 83% of grade 7, 85% of grade 8, and 100% of grade 10 students who were served in the support course showed growth. Our efforts have continued, as has the growth. In 2018, 100% of our grade 10 class met the graduation proficiency level on the state test, meaning no student would need to retake the test to meet that state graduation requirement. Our intentional, systemic approach has led to measurable student achievement.
- Explain how ESEA federal funds are used to support your improvement efforts.
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The ESEA federal funds and having the opportunity to attend the annual conference will help our professional development efforts. Our staff has a continuous-growth mindset and consistently looks for ways to improve the quality of education our students receive.
- Identify the critical professional development activities you use to improve teaching and student learning.
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Davenport’s professional development approach encourages teachers and administrators to grow their skills and follow their passions to benefit our students. We have some teachers and administrators approaching retirement and others early in their careers, but all are eager to improve their craft and are supported in their professional development pursuits. Administrators model professional growth through memberships in professional associations, our principal’s pursuit of superintendent credentials, and our superintendent’s involvement at the state legislative level. Their pursuits have impacted instructional practices and school programs through our district’s participation in the Washington State Leadership Academy. This three-year program provided a trained mentor to guide our leadership team of administrators and teachers through a system of inquiry to identify and address a self-selected problem of practice in our school system. Through this process we made staffing and course changes that directly impacted student ELA proficiency rates on both district and state assessments, culminating in 100% graduation rates for our class of 2018 and 2019.
- Describe how data is used to improve student achievement and inform decision making.
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We have a rigorous process of identifying students who are struggling academically. Our district uses course/assignment grades, classroom assessments/interventions, MAP testing, Aimsweb, SBA and other data to make informed decisions on students’ academic growth. When students are struggling, team-based decisions determine academic placement. Tier II interventions and supports are differentiated beginning each summer when we analyze MAP and SBA data to determine which students did not show typical growth in ELA and math. Targeted interventions and classes are then created for students, providing an opportunity to “catch up” the upcoming year. Throughout the year, data is monitored to facilitate students exiting or beginning academic intervention which includes support classes and daily 20-minute Response to Intervention lessons.
- Describe your school culture and explain changes you’ve taken to improve it.
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Our school culture challenges us to expand our students’ opportunities by creating partnerships that add programs like Project Lead the Way, Construction Trades, and Certified Nursing Assistant certification. Our school culture motivates us to keep striving for excellence by implementing Response to Intervention strategies, offering a selection of creative and performing arts courses (including an annual staged musical production), and adding Advanced Placement and College in the High School courses to our curriculum. Our school culture fosters teacher communication focused on impacting student learning through weekly cross-grade and cross-curriculum professional learning community endeavors. But most importantly, our school culture values every member and maintains a growth mindset to support each individual--whether a student, teacher, support staff, administrator, or parent--on his/her path toward our goal of creating endless possibilities for our students through the options and opportunities we provide every day at Davenport Middle/High School.
Stats
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Category 2
Selected in 2019
-
Grades: 6 - 12
School Setting: rural
Town Population: 1
Student Enrollment: 331
Student Demographics:
Black/African American: 0.3%
Teacher/Student Ratio: 1:13
White/Caucasian: 92.4%
Hispanic: 2.4%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
Asian: 0.9%
Native American: 2.7%
Other: 1.2%
% Reduced Lunch: 54%
% ELL Learners: 0.3%
Founded: 1938 -
PRINCIPAL:
Chad Prewitt -
CONTACT:
801 7th Street
Davenport, WA 99122
509-725-4021
cprewitt@davenportsd.org