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New appointees challenge GCSC administrators on improvement strategies
Leaving no doubt of their backgrounds as educators, the two newest members of the Greencastle School Board made their presence known during their August meeting.
With probing questions and observations, Jimmy Beasley and Kathryn Dory were not shy in challenging some of the solutions district administrators have put forward as standardized test scores show Greencastle students falling behind.
The discussion sprung from the monthly report of Asst. Supt. Becky McPherson, who presented a variety of data from tests such as ILEARN for elementary and middle school students, IREAD for third-graders and SAT for high school.
Presenting ILEARN data for third- through eighth-graders for the years 2019 through 2024, McPherson made particular note of the results of the current freshman class at GHS for the years in question.
As third-graders in 2019, 53 percent of the students showed proficiency in English/language arts (ELA), while 61 percent were proficient in math. By this spring while completing their eighth-grade year, 35 percent displayed ELA proficiency and just 24 percent in math.
Other GCSC classes in the data set did not show as significant a drop, but also limited improvement.
“You can see we’ve stayed pretty stagnant,” McPherson said. “We’ll go up a few, we’ll go down a few, but we haven’t seen any huge increases.”
The data for IREAD, which tests a student’s ability to read by the end of third grade, was also less-than-encouraging, as GCCS has lost ground on other county schools in recent years, going from a 90-percent pass rate in 2022, first in the county, to an 80-percent rate in 2024, which ranks last.
The Indiana General Assembly has passed a law requiring retention of students who do not pass IREAD by the end of third grade.
On the SAT, just 21 percent of GHS juniors showed proficiency in both math and reading/writing.
From this, McPherson moved on to action plans being put in place, such as additional testing. GCSC recently agreed to be part of a pilot program with the state for ILEARN Checkpoint, which will have students taking the exam additional times to see how they are progressing. She noted the decision was difficult, but district leaders decided they wanted to have the data.
On a day-to-day basis, she spoke of changes at the school level, such as the Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach to phonics, which is entering its third year, and the new CKLA reading curriculum, in its second year.
“We have worked really hard. Our teachers work really hard,” McPherson said. “They’ve worked really hard for years and years, but we’ve been working in different directions. Now what we’re trying to do is go in the same direction and be more intentional with what we’re doing. That includes aligning our master schedules, adding in small group instructional times (WIN Time) so that we can really be intense with those students’ skills.”
Beasley, a former English teacher and school administrator, questioned the effectiveness of the approaches already in place.
“It doesn’t look like they’ve been successful,” Beasley said.
“It takes three to five years to see the change, and I think we’re in our third and a half year with OG. CLKA, they started the reading adoption when I was a principal here (in 2022-23),” McPherson said. “We had a team of teachers who were on the adoption cycle. They piloted lessons, we piloted not only CKLA but other reading curriculums as well. We got the feedback on it, and that was why CKLA was chosen. It was also on the approved DOE list for reading curriculums.”
Beasley then brought Supt. Jeff Gibboney into the conversation.
“So, Mr. Gibboney, what would you say is an effective amount?” Beasley asked. “Are we looking at another two years before we see improvement? We’re in year three-and-a-half, it sounds like.”
“Yes, as Becky said, we’re aligning our arrows and everyone is working really, really hard to get to where we need to be,” Gibboney said. “Probably one of the greatest challenges even before Covid and coming out of Covid was the fact that we were operating off of open educational resources. Our teachers did not have a set, solid curriculum, so we wouldn’t necessarily have that consistency throughout the classrooms.”
Gibboney added that a review of the district math curriculum is coming soon, as GCSC has been operating from Eureka Math since 2015.
Beasley also emphasized that he does not want to see the plans for Greencastle schools driven solely by data from standardized tests.
“I’m not a proponent of that being the only resource, and I want to see growth. It doesn’t appear like the growth is there,” Beasley said. “I want to ensure that we’re giving the teachers and the building-level administrators the resources they need to be successful for growth in the students first. If we’re not hitting that growth, then if we can have some more data on the growth they’re getting inside the classroom, I would like to see that.
“If we could add that to this, I think it would paint a better picture and shine a better light on what we’re doing. I don’t think the assessments are necessarily the end-all, be-all.”
McPherson said this is being addressed through professional learning community (PLC) gatherings of teachers.
“That’s what we’re learning through the PLC process is not only looking at tests,” she said. “We’re looking at classroom observations: What are you seeing that your kids can do when you pull them out and work with them? And talking about that — because that’s data as well — and using that to drive your instruction.”
“I’d be curious to see how that goes,” Beasley said. “If you could give us some of that at some point, that would be great.”
There were also questions surrounding the implementation of the master schedules of which McPherson spoke, with board Secretary Megan Inman initially asking about the 30 minutes of time for both math and reading that have been added. McPherson said the additional time for math was in place last year, with the reading time added this year.
Dory and Beasley, however, had questions about what the schedules actually look like.
“How is that schedule being implemented? How is that aligning throughout the school?” Dory asked.
McPherson said students have been placed in WIN groups according to their ability levels and are receiving more personalized instruction through these smaller settings.
“Where is the time coming from?” Beasley said. “And what are we doing with the enrichment kids? How are we pushing them to the next level as well?”
“They’re being pulled as well into a small group for the enrichment piece of it,” McPherson said of the more advanced students. “Mrs. (Gayle) Hansen is actually working with them at all three schools. I actually met with her last week, so we’ve got some resources for her to pull that small group of kids.”
As to the schedule overall, McPherson said, “We’re not really missing out on anything. We just tightened up our schedule. There was more transition time. I didn’t really know their schedule before at TZ and Ridpath and Deer Meadow, but I don’t really think it was a very tight master schedule from what I had heard and seen of it. The principals worked hard to tighten that up and make sure that every minute we have with the kids is effective and intentional.”
It’s this “tightened up” schedule at Tzouanakis Intermediate School about which Dory, a veteran music teacher, was particularly outspoken.
“I really have a problem with the way the schedule is at TZ and utilizing teachers in the afternoon out of their content area in order to create these small groups,” Dory said, noting how music, art and PE teachers are being used for small-group instruction time for other subjects. “I don’t see how that is sound educational (practice).”
She expressed her belief that kids having each special (music, art, PE, library and STEM) for a week and then going on to other classes for several weeks is not beneficial. But she finds the use of these teachers outside their specialties even more alarming.
“To have those teachers being utilized in the afternoon for small group instruction out of their content area — I’m not seeing the value of all of this yet,” Dory said. “I really want to see some data that this is going to be an educationally sound thing.”
“It might be important to clarify or add that those elective teachers are not being pulled from classes in which they’re already teaching their rotation for the third- or fourth- or fifth-grade students,” Gibboney said. “That’s additional time they had within their contract day in which they’re being utilized to work with small groups of kids. So it would have been time otherwise they would not have been assigned to work with a class.”
“I need to see a schedule,” Dory said.
“Sure. Set up an appointment,” Gibboney said. “We’ll talk.”
Beasley, Dory and Inman were joined for the meeting by Board President Ed Wilson. Vice President Dale Pierce was absent.
Additional topics covered during the recent school board meeting will be highlighted in an upcoming story.