Retreat Notes

Notes from the UTLA LAHS November 3rd Retreat

Agenda
1. An Assessment of LA High’s Strengths and Weaknesses as they relate to developing a plan for reform
2. Developing OUR vision - Why do we need one? How could we make one? And what is it?!
3. What elements do we need to put into place/build on in order to get our reform vision started
4. Next Steps

What actually happened at the meeting:

1. Assessment:

Strengths
SLCs:
• Smaller groups (students and staff)
• Heightened Teacher Collaboration
• Willingness of 60%+ percent of our faculty to participate is evidence that real comprehensive reform may be possible
• Expanded Leadership capacity and strength (seeing good things as more people are getting involved in design teams, etc)

Professional Development
• Seems generally more focused, more meaningful
• We actually have control over a great deal of what is going on in our PD (especially compared to other schools)

People are demonstrating a willingness to step up and take on new roles and leadership capacities

CLC: technology exists, is accessible and appears to be expandable at LAHS
Students appear willing to participate in big changes in the school culture (hats, ipods, SLCs)

We have a big chunk of quality teachers and a strong batch of newer, dedicated teachers

We have some money to play with e.g. QEIA, even if there is less of other funds than there were last year.

UTLA local chapter has some depth and strength.

Weaknesses
• Communication
o Between Staff
o No clear point people for certain resources and information
• Discipline policy, particularly consistency problems
• Integration of ESL students and Special Education students
• Data Transparency and Usability (meaningfulness)
• Lack of Training: technology, forms, student services and interventions
• General Lack of Clear Policies and Procedures
• Lack of Administrative Accountability and high administrative turnover
• Weak Communication amongst Teacher and Parent Leadership: Building council, SBM, SSC, Dept Chairs, parent councils
• Lack of a Real Unified Vision for the direction of the school
• Lack of Genuine Control: meeting times, bell schedule, etc
• Lack of Budget Transparency: Dr. Choe, S. Austin
• Bureaucratic system – near total lack of administrative accountability
• Programming problems and track equity
• Concerns about maintaining funding for CLC
• Weak community connections
• Weak parent involvement and underused parent resource center

2. Reform Vision

OverView of Discussion:
We discussed WHY and IF a vision was needed. The answer seemed a unanimous Yes (make much easier by our collective assessment that the lack of a common collective vision was a weakness.

With WASC/accreditation, the revising/re/writing of the LAHS Single School Plan, and the threats of being a PI5 school in a PI3 district all upon us, combined with the potential openings of the Innovation Division and other reform potentials which would require from us a clear sense of direction in order to be able to participate, it seemed to make a lot of sense to develop our own reform vision. This kind of plan could work to align all the work we are doing and help us all be on the same page.

We looked at three documents (see attached) the LAHS contributions at the Local District 3 focus groups; the 10 Schools Common Issues Modified for LAHS (made at the time when the superintendent promised $17 million to those high need schools), and the Crenshaw High Reform Vision. There are other documents that would be useful to look at (our High Priority School Grant Plan, the Mayor’s current proposal on school reform) but we focused on a few (short) ones.

There were strong cautions against forgetting – we have to use our institutional memory to say what it is we want and what we do NOT want (using our experiences and our ideas). We recognized that people might be a bit suspicious of starting a process of visioning when this had been done in different forms before. However, there was a clear recognition that a clear vision could be really useful in not only approaching 3rd party partners or the district and pushing them to move on our plans (as opposed to their own), as well as focusing our budgets and facilitating collaboration and communication between the different groups on campus.

Specifics of the Plan:

The easiest way, it seemed, to organize a reform plan was to have a number of key categories or shared values: “pillars”. By looking at the specific things that could be demands or elements of reform, we came up with a number of overarching categories:
 Control over our School Site/Local Power/Autonomy
 Parent Engagement (including under it things like z-time to call parents; fully funded parent center with computers for public/parent use, consistent community outreach)
 Classroom Quality
 Accountability
 Control over Funds and Generally Increased Resources
 Control over Scheduling
 Cleanliness/School Environment (increased custodial time
 Support for Teachers/Development of Teacher Networks
 Increased Class Offerings and Electives as well as Coordination of Curriculum with Middle Schools, Adult Schools and Intersession

There was a lot of discussion about what each of these could look like and what elements would support each more general topic.

3. Process to Flesh This Reform Plan Out:

We set a goal of having a strong draft of this Reform Plan out by the March Track Change. By that point we proposed having an all track meeting where the plan was revealed and (hopefully) approved. This would give us time to move on things for the 2008-9 School year. Then to follow this up with a community LAHS Townhall Meeting to make sure that this reached into the community.

Stephanie Forman agreed to take these ideas and turn them into some key organizing categories and then turn them back to us for further discussion and refinement (via email).

We discussed each one of us on the steering committee or interested participants taking some responsibility for further fleshing out areas of interest and then turning them back to the rest of us for discussion (via email).

After Stephanie gets us an initial skeleton that we then flesh out a bit, each of us would take on a subsection to further elaborate.
 Carmen Blacklock said she would further flesh out the section around Parent Outreach/Engagement
 What will you do?

Getting Additions/Feedback Contributions to the Reform Vision:

Discussions with Key Groups
This very rudimentary plan needs to be further elaborated, added to, etc. The process we discussed was one in which we would engage folks in a variety of ways – small groups lunch or afterschool conversations, one-on-one meetings during lunch, conversations in our departments or SLCs,etc.

Some subgroupings of LAHS that we zeroed in on as important included (in parentheses are the teachers who agreed to help get feedback from these groups) PLEASE PUT YOUR NAME TO A GROUP

* Students
* Parents (Carmen, Rebecca)
* Classified
* Lead Teachers
* Departments
* Alumni Teachers (Tim)
* Mid-Level Experience Teachers (8-15 year vets) (Rebecca)
* New Teachers
* Veteran Teachers (Tim)

Key Questions that we would pose to these groups:
? What do we need in terms of support services?
? What do we need in terms of safety?
? What do we need in terms of parent involvement?
? What do we need in terms of instruction/curriculum?
? What do we need in terms of school leadership?
? What do we need in order to improve communication?

(We might use a different filter when talking to different groups on campus, e.g.
• At a UTLA meeting: What do you want to see in terms of….?
• To new teachers: What do you need in terms of…?
• To veteran teachers: When things were the best, what did you have….? What do you not have now that you once did that was useful?)

Survey of Staff and Community:
We also discussed the creation of a survey at the beginning of the process in order to create a baseline for improvement
 A survey for the overall needs of the school
 A survey for how our administration is doing(!) in the spirit of collaboration and accountability

Parallel Track to the Development of the Reform Vision:

Concurrent with the creation of our school reform vision would be a seeking out of ‘audience’: we discussed the need to reach out to
* 3rd Party Partners to a) give us ideas and feedback on the reform vision and b) to potentially work with us to help us get the autonomy we need to implement our reform plan (e.g. get into the Innovation Division or get out of any High Priority Schools punishments)
* Community organizations who could partner with us on the implementation of our reform vision at the local level, actually helping us do some of the things that we want

“Branding” the Plan:

As people are participating in the creation of the plan, there needs to be a way to unify the process itself. Carmen was talking about a catchphrase; Jason was talking about a ‘tagline’. We need something that identifies the process.

Accountability to and for the Reform Vision:
We realized that a lot of the cynicism about the creation of reform plans comes from a history of making plans and not implementing them. While we aren’t going to be able to move on the accountability piece right away, we did discuss the need to
* Create an accountability timeline
* Assign groups on campus to certain aspects of the Reform Vision in order to work on accountability around those aspects.
* Continuously survey the staff on the administration, as well as other bodies on campus, to see how well people are doing (especially those who do not appear accountable to anyone in particular – a problem in a bureaucracy).

5. NEXT STEPS:

a. Help flesh out the plan over email
b. Pick some subgroups that you can solicit information/feedback from
c. Figure out if you have contacts with or want to help contact 3rd party partners or community organizations