Reading, math scores on rise at Long Beach Elementary, OSD 308 Board told

Long Beach Elementary School students are behaving better and showing improvement in reading and math, Phil Murray, school principal, and Dr. Lindsay Allen, director of elementary education for Oswego School District 308, told the Board of Education Monday evening, June 17.

Murray and Allen presented the board with the 2018-2019 school improvement plan for the Boulder Hill school during Monday's meeting.

Long Beach Elementary is classified as a Title 1 school due to its large concentration of low income students. As a result, it receives federal funding to assist in meeting its students' educational goals. Long Beach has an enrollment of about 475 students, including 38 percent who are Hispanic and 52 percent that are low income.

Murray told the board that members of the school's improvement team examined how to improve in three areas: academic performance, conditions for learning and school culture/climate.

In academic performance, Murray said, students in third, fourth, and fifth grades have shown improvement in English Language Arts scores for the PARCC exam over the past three years, while math scores were not as consistent.

"One of our drives was to be real intentional with what we're looking at, and math kind of stuck out to us," Murray said.

Teachers and administrators set a goal to have 37% of fourth and fifth graders meet or exceed standards on the 2019 Illinois Assessment of Readiness, an increase of about 8%. To accomplish this, teachers looked at the scores of the students who were "Approaching" standards, and worked to raise at least half of their scores, to meet the 37% goal.

Title 1 funds were used to secure a math interventionist for the school, Murray said, while in the classroom the "Power Half Hour" intervention block was reworked to focus on math, the professional development in math was increased for staff members, and the school's math Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA) worked as a co-teacher in several classrooms.

"We really put a big focus on those areas," he said.

Results from the school's Standardized Testing And Reporting (STAR) exam, showed an increase of 14% in students' mathematics scores, from 67% to 81% meeting and exceeding, between the most recent fall and winter exams. An April exam that had been pushed back showed 72% of students meeting or exceeding in mathematics.

Murray expressed pride in the increase in test scores.

"All the targeting that we were doing made a difference," Murray said. "We still made a gain, but it was that immediate gain over that short time that said that the things we're doing were starting to make a difference."

In conditions for learning and school culture/climate, Murray told the Board that Superintendent Dr. John Sparlin had encouraged administrators to, "Meet the whole child."

"It's not just the academics, there's a lot of other pieces to it," he said. "These next two goals really hit that, it's made such a difference at Long Beach these last few years."

Much of these goals were met through the work of the school's Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) team, which hosted a Family & Community Night that saw more than 140 attendees and focused on parents and student engagement. Long Beach has also partnered with Oswego East High School and Oswego High School, to enable high school mentors to come three days a week to work with students, while older students at Long Beach work with younger students through the Peer Partners program.

The school's Behavior Support Team held behavior walks to teach appropriate behavior in the school, led the Positive Actions While in School (PAWS) program to reward students and staff engaging in positive and appropriate behavior, and worked to promote restorative practices at Long Beach.

The goal for improving learning conditions, Murray said, was to decrease the number of behavioral infractions by 25% - no more than 120 violations for the 2018-2019 school year, and to decrease the amount of time that students are spending outside of the classroom in in-school interventions or out-of-school suspensions due to behavioral infractions.

By the end of the school year, 87 behavioral referrals had been recorded, a drop of 47% from the previous year's total of 160 infractions.

"We really hit our goal on that, and I believe that all of the social/emotional stuff really had a big impact on that," Murray said.

The school's culture/climate goal, closely related to conditions for learning, increased engagement between parents, students, staff, and the Long Beach Community, through activities and programs including the WatchDOGS (Dads Of Great Students) program, Grandparents Night, Family Gym Night, and reading bedtime stories on the Long Beach Facebook account.

"I know a lot of times you can look at the academic, the social-emotional, and there may not be an exact trend or an exact science of showing that they're related, but I really believe that they are," Murray said. "The amount of social-emotional things we've done has resulted in great scores, and I really think they're related."

At the conclusion of Murray's presentation, board member Brent Lightfoot praised the results and improvements from Long Beach.

"These are the types of reports that the entire community wants to see from our schools," Lightfoot said. "We talk at length about how we strive to have better results at our schools, get kids to a higher level, and this is one of the first times that I've seen data that has been so clear and so evident."

Murray also informed the board that Long Beach has been selected to appear in December 2019 as a featured school at the Raising Student Achievement state conference, hosted by the regional offices of education, to discuss the school's improvements with districts and administrators from across the state.