DPS PRINCIPAL PICK BACKS OUT MINUTES BEFORE HIRING
Five schools will participate in the project over the next three years.
The Dayton Public Schools Board of Education this week approved spending $475,000 for the Partnership for Leaders in Education, a program based at the University of Virginia, to develop and implement improvement plans at five DPS schools over the next three years.
The selected schools are Fairview Elementary, Louise Troy Elementary, Edwin Joel Brown Elementary, Ruskin Elementary and Belmont High School.
The project will spend the 20182019 school year assessing and designing a plan to improve the schools’ performance, and the following two years rolling out that plan.
Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli said the chosen schools represent a cross-section of the district. She said the program is less about turning around just low-performing schools, but about seeing if it’s effective at a variety of schools before considering expansion.
“The idea is to transform the district and not just a select number of schools. You think big, you start small, you scale fast,” said Lynsa Davie, DPS chief of schools special projects.
Davie said the program was instrumental in helping her turn around Chase Elementary School in Cincinnati, where she worked before coming to DPS. She said it helped them lift it out of academic emergency.
“I can tell you I come knowing that it does work,” she said.
Chase Elementary’s performance index score on state report cards is currently higher than Dayton’s district average, and higher than most DPS elementary schools.
Lolli said the district looked at several district improvement programs and chose this one because of its demonstrated success in Cincinnati.
A brochure for the Partnership for Leaders in Education says the 16 Cincinnati schools it worked with increased their math proficiency by an average of 15 percent and reading proficiency by 17 percent. It claims the program brought five schools out of academic emergency and raised performance index scores at 12 schools. The school district’s contract proposal from Partnership for Leaders in Education claims additional successes.
“The (program) is the only research-proven effort in the country focused on establishing system conditions ripe for change and building transformative leadership capacity to achieve that change,” the proposal says. “With the partnership now in its 15th year, most of our partner schools outgain state averages, almost 50 percent of our partner schools have experienced double-digit proficiency gains within two years and 20 percent of those schools achieve over 25-point gains within three years.”
Lolli said the program will be funded with federal grant money.