School Improvement Plan

Highlight 3-5 strengths of your school and how those strengths foster belonging, wellbeing and learning.

One of Maple Hills’ greatest strengths is our Family Engagement. We have a high number of parent volunteers, 100% PTA membership for the last 22 years, and good community attendance at events. Every year we have an extensive number of parents who volunteer at school, this year 285 have already completed the volunteer application. We get volunteers to assist in the library, do tasks for teachers, read with students, and run programs. The PTA and volunteers are also instrumental in continuing annual programs that contribute to students’ growth, like a Science Fair, Eagle Reader, and the Art Docent program. Every classroom has at least one art docent and they work closely with the teacher and Art Docent directors to plan monthly classroom projects, including clay and glasswork. The PTA also runs an Eagle Reader program which encourages students to read every month and record their minutes and receive free books. The money raised at our two PTA-led book fairs is used to purchase books to give away during Eagle Reader and also to our library. In addition, we also have a strong VOICE mentor program, ending the year, last year, with 15 VOICE mentors, including community and high school volunteers. These 15 members served 31 students, which is double the amount we were able to support the year before. JoEllen is also working on growing our Site Council and looking for additional community representatives to join in order to increase parent representation and feedback.

Another strength for Maple Hills is our instructional block scheduling. We use block scheduling to enable team common planning and support for interventionists. While we have done this for years with reading, this year we have added in a math intervention block. In Spring 2024, JoEllen worked closely with the interventionists first, the LRC team, Multi-lingual Learners (ML), and Title 1/ Learning Assistance Program (TLAP) teachers in order to build a program around our interventions. We are strongly focused on ensuring that all students receive the core lessons while still being able to attend intervention support at their level. In addition, this type of scheduling has provided times available for push-in support which has ended up benefiting more students than only the ones designated to receive interventions. Our ML and LRC population have both continued to grow every year, so this type of scheduling is challenging but it is allowing time for students to learn amongst one and another while also receiving targeted intervention for their needs.

One of our other strengths (and goals) is providing meaningful and successful interventions for students. For the past 4 years we have received a grant from ISF to provide math and/or literacy tutoring for our students before and after school. Last year (and this year) we used the before/after school tutoring to support the highest need of each grade level. After meeting with each team and looking at our Tier 2 data, each grade level selected the area of highest need and specific skill. For instance, the 1^st grade team selected reading and used i-Ready reading fall scores and classroom assessments to select students, while the other teams selected to work on math using i-Ready math scores and specific domains to focus on, such as Numbers and Operations. I believe this grade level decision-making is what encouraged more teachers to volunteer to be tutors. We served 53 students and every student showed improvement on their overall i-Ready score from fall to spring, ranging in improvement from 10-72 points. This year we are also planning to serve between 40-60 students.

We also were fortunate to gain an additional TLAP teacher to our staff this year and are serving 28 students* in Really Great Reading and 34 students for math support compared to 38 students in reading and 18 students in math last year.

• ’23-’24 – TLAP = 38 total literacy with Carmen;
• ’23-’24 – TLAP Math = 18 math with Carmen
• ’24-’25 – TLAP Literacy = 28 RGR with Carmen & Jenny and 27 students in classrooms = 55
• ’24-’25 – TLAP Math = 34 Math students with Carmen & Jenny on a 6-week rotating basis

*With two TLAP teachers this year, they are able to serve 28 of the highest need in reading students (not including students with an IEP) in much smaller groups in addition to 27 students served in Really great Reading with a classroom teacher for a total of 55 students. With these smaller phonics groups, we are hoping to close the gap more quickly.

Describe 2-3 opportunities in the coming years your school can leverage for this school improvement plan and to address disproportionality?

One area that we have decided to focus on this year is attendance with our students living at Passage Point. Looking at the data, the current students who live at Passage Point had an absence rate well above the 10% goal last year. While this group also has significant needs in academics, behavior, mental health counseling, etc., we chose them to initiate our Attendance Incentive Program to make sure they were first here to get services. Starting on Sept. 16, our counselor meets 14 students every morning when they arrive to give them breakfast, put a star on their attendance chart for being present, and encourage a positive day. Students earn prizes after a specific amount of stickers and this seems to be highly motivating. In just 38 days, we have already seen a drastic decrease in their percentage of absences. While the percentage of absences ranged last year from 13% - 29%, this year’s percentages have almost halved, between 0%-26% within the 6 weeks. Four of our students have had perfect attendance since starting this program! Our counselor is using this group this year as the focus group to see what is manageable and what is successful. We are using PTA money and ISF grants to purchase morning snacks and prizes. The morning snack program is open to anyone and our counselor also sees 5-10 additional students who stop by to get breakfast daily.

One of our biggest disproportionalities is with students in Special Education. While the number of students with an IEP continues to grow (currently we have 57 students in LRC1, almost 13% of our student population), their growth is not at the rate of our general education population. Last year in i-Ready Reading, the school as a whole grew from 49% at or above grade level in the fall to 79% at/above grade level in the spring, a growth of 30%. Our Special Education population grew from 15% at/above grade level in the fall to 40% at/above grade level in the spring. While this is a terrific amount of growth, it is still far from what the general population achieved. You can see this same gap on our SIP Dashboard in both reading and math where Students with a Disability have a large gap than the general population and the BIPOC Focus Group.

One opportunity we are taking advantage of this year is the block scheduling. We specifically designed the block schedule starting with Special Education and LRC1 groups in order to determine the best time for classroom literacy blocks. The main goal of this was to allow all students to stay in their classroom during the 90 minute literacy block and be pulled out for additional reading and/or math instruction during the 30 minute literacy or math success block. This allows students to stay within their classroom to hear the main instruction, work with other role models, and become introduced to the mainstream curriculum. In addition, our schedule is focused on allowing interventionists and paras an opportunity to push in during main instruction. We are still working on how best to serve all students, as not every student fits neatly into our schedule, but I am excited to see the amount of growth from these students who are receiving supplemental instruction rather than being supplanted.

Based on previous School Improvement Planning & Tiered Fidelity Inventories, describe 1-2 systems, structures or practices recently introduced or expanded that shows promise for student achievement and will be continued? What impact are you observing? What data are you using to monitor impact?

After our SIP Board Discussion last year and listening to other principals, I decided that I wanted to try a principal-led literacy intervention myself. I created the Literacy Leader program. After viewing the overall i-Ready Fall Reading scores in Homeroom, I selected 65 students in 2^nd-5^th grade to invite to a Literacy Leader program. From January through June, I met with each grade level group once a month. The goal was to instill a love of reading with them with the hope that a love of reading would lead to more reading which would lead to improved test scores. Students were chosen if they scored in a level 1 or 2 on the fall i-Ready diagnostic. In the Spring, 35 students remained at the same level they started with, 5 went down a level, and 25 improved a level. Out of the 44 4^th and 5^th graders, 29 students passed the ELA SBA in the Spring of 2024. While my original plan was to include time to read or reading practice, the program quickly evolved into a more leadership role. An unintended benefit was the amount of leadership and pride the students gained. The biggest growth I saw was how many students wanted to take notes during our discussion to share with their class. They all wanted to make monthly presentations and also ask questions to gather feedback to bring back to the group. One parent even commented that their student came home beaming that he had been hand selected by Ms. Tapper to be a Literacy Leader. I did not include Kinder or 1^st grade in the Literacy Leader group but some of the Literacy Leaders volunteered to be representatives to these classes as well as their own. While I plan to continue this program this year, my goal is to work on adding some additional forms of measurement and specific ways students might improve their own reading skills. The other challenge I face is figuring out when and how to hold these meetings so that students do not miss important class time but that it happens within the school day to avoid any transportation concerns.

One of the other systems that we have refined and implemented is the change to our Tier 2 Team process. In the past, the Tier 2 Team included the principal, Dean, Counselor, TLAP interventionist, and PBSES Coach. With the reduction of PBSES coaches, we found that the four of us were not only providing all the interventions but also all the brainstorming. So, in 2023-24, we changed it to grade level meetings with teams. The core team still consists of the principal, dean, counselor, and two TLAP teachers, who meet weekly just ourselves and then also meet each week with a different grade level team, joined by LRC1 and specialists. This provides more voices and ideas to the discussion and brainstorming process, as well as models for the teachers the importance of relying on their team and other “in-class” resources in order to help students succeed. What we are noticing is that the data we are using is highlighting pretty accurately the students that teachers have concerns with. We are also able to incorporate a variety of data, including not only academics but attendance, behavior, and hearing/vision. The variety of data is helping us to screen out what truly might be going on. Are they struggling in reading because of the high number of absences? What intervention is most appropriate and least restrictive? We are using fall, winter, and spring data in each of these categories to see if scores are improving, i-Ready, SBA, attendance, etc., and also looking at the number of Sped referrals and those qualifying.