Relentless Pursuit: The Key to Making Continuous Improvement in Fairborn City Schools

“I think this has been a mission that has sustained the test of time. It's been here for a long time and it continues to guide us. The key word is relentless. No matter what challenges we may face or our students may face, I think we are relentless in working through those challenges and trying to find ways to support our students to help them be successful,” said Dr. Sue Brackenhoff, Fairborn’s Director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Asssessment.

Fairborn’s stick-to-itiveness is paying off. On the most recent state report card, Fairborn exceeded state standards with a rating of four out of five stars. In particular, the district significantly exceeded student growth expectations and state standards in closing educational gaps.

Located about 12 miles east of Dayton, the district serves about 4,200 Pre-K through 12th-grade students in four school buildings: a primary school (PreK-grade 2), an intermediate school (grades 3-5), a middle school (grades 6-8), and a high school (grades 9-12). Over 86% of Fairborn’s student population is characterized by the state as economically disadvantaged and a little over 20% of the student population is identified as students with disabilities. Fairborn serves a diverse population. About 70% of the student body is White; with Black, Multiracial, and Hispanic students equaling about 12%, 11%, and 5%, respectively. In addition to serving students from Fairborn and Bath Township, the district also serves students from the Wright Patterson Air Force Base who come to Fairborn City Schools from all parts of the world.

District Perspective and Guidance

Lisa Van Hoose, Assistant Principal of Fairborn Intermediate School, credits Brackenhoff with fostering a commitment to relentlessness in the district’s work to prepare each student for success. “Dr. Brackenhoff has really been instrumental in how our district leadership team has evolved and sustained itself,” she said. Van Hoose is one of the longest serving members of Fairborn’s district leadership team (DLT), having served as a teacher for 25 years, union president, instructional coach, and now assistant principal.

In addition to Brackenhoff’s leadership, Van Hoose also attributes the success of the DLT to having strong teacher involvement. “I think the most important thing is that it was inclusive of all of the staff and it really focuses on the teacher’s perspective of being in the classroom, boots on the ground, and learning what we can sustain and what we have to push aside or get rid of,” explained Van Hoose. “The focus is on how we make our district better and how we make our students’ progress grow. That comes from the fact that we are a team; we’ve always been a team. Our opinions matter, our thoughts matter, and it’s just been a journey and it’s been a great journey,” she added.

The journey to make Fairborn’s DLT a high functioning team focused on districtwide improvement in adult professional practice and student achievement began nine years ago. “Lisa [Van Hoose] and Melissa [Williams] are probably the founding members of our DLT and when I came into this role nine years ago, we really got the DLT process started. The buildings had their building leadership teams, but we really didn't have that district perspective and guidance. And so we've been very intentional about providing that support so that the work that goes on in the building is focused on our mission and continues the intentional steps to help us continue to improve,” explained Brackenhoff.

“Our data told us adult implementation was something we needed to work on. So we adopted a new math curriculum, a new reading curriculum, and introduced coaches to support adult implementation,” said Brackenhoff. Intermediate Literacy Coach Courtney Spiegel and Intermediate Math Coach Jared Reed are two instructional coaches supporting teachers in the classroom. They and other coaches work with Williams to understand how to use data to improve teaching and learning and build the capacity of teachers in effective data use.

“The use of data has driven literally everything for the past four or five years. Being able to understand that data, look at it in different ways, get different perspectives on it, and then share that data with the teachers has been instrumental in supporting a shift in teacher mindset,” offered Spiegel who splits her time between teaching half days and working as a grades 3-5 literacy coach.

“Our natural instinct is to blame the kids and say, ‘they’re not doing this, they aren’t coming with that,’ but the data is showing us that we need to stop and look at adult implementation, and ask ‘what can we do?’ We can't control where kids are coming from, who they're living with, where they're living, but we can control what we're doing. And I think that's been what the data has shown us and I think teachers have been really receptive to hearing that and willing to change their instruction,” Spiegel added.

At the same time, the widespread use of data at all levels of the system as a way work is done has ameliorated the feeling on the part of some teachers that they might be singled out. “When discussions are rooted in a student data, hopefully it takes away some of the personalization for the teacher. We're looking at the results of our student data and that helps our coaches work with teachers in a more neutral and supportive role,” explained Brackenhoff.

A marriage of academic and non-academic foci. Fairborn’s goals are geared toward making improvements in both academic and non-academic areas. Our focus is on the academic side, as well as on the social, emotional, or whole child side. So as we approach our challenges, we keep in mind both our academic goals as well as the whole child in trying to, again, support students to be successful,” said Brackenhoff.

Longtime Student Services Director, Gary Walker, elaborates: “If we're looking at it from the standpoint of our district leadership team and our OIP, our work has been all inclusive in focusing on improvements for all children. We've looked at two parts; we've looked at the social emotional learning and the academic part. And we've agreed that both are critical for learning. They are a marriage that walk side by side so we look across everything with our special education students, with our English as a second language students, with our gifted students, with all populations and attend to the emotional side, and climate and culture, to support learning. It's all inclusive.”

Broadening Perspectives with a Focus on Solutions

The concurrent establishment of the Ohio Leadership Advisory Council (OLAC) and the development of the Ohio Improvement Process by the Ohio Department of Education began in 2007. Between those early years and Fairborn’s development of a high functioning DLT around 2015, the focus was on “report card issues, literacy, numeracy, graduation rates, and those types of things,” recalled Gary Walker, Fairborn’s Student Services Director.

“There was not as much guidance from the district and I don’t remember there being a structured district leadership team. Most of our support seemed to be coming from our state support team” added Brackenhoff who, at that time, was a principal in the district. Not unlike many school districts in the state at the time, each building operated somewhat separately from the other schools in the district. “In 2007, when the OIP process came into play, we were at grade-level buildings. I was a building principal and you kind of felt like you were an island out there on your own,” said Brackenhoff.

Brackenhoff’s frustration at working in relative isolation prompted her to take steps to create a districtwide focus, aligning goals, processes, and supports across buildings. “As grade-banded schools, we build on each other. I knew the frustration I felt as a building principal in the early days. TBTs were always struggling about what they should be doing and it seemed like our focus ended up being very narrow so the impact wasn’t evident. When I moved from the building level to central office in curriculum, my focus was to try and help align work across buildings,” explained Brackenhoff.

Solution teams. A large part of the effort to align essential work across schools involved making TBTs more effective. Fairborn’s schools are large and there were multiple TBTs focused on fairly narrow skills. According to Brackenhoff, teams weren’t making an impact on achievement, graduation, and early literacy. “We shifted to solution teams as a way for teachers to understand the team is rooted in identifying what the problem is we're trying to solve. And of course, we have data to support that. So then we ended up with fewer TBTs through solution teams. We focused on some of the big picture kind of data and probably the first one where we saw a great return on this concept of solution teams was with our chronic absenteeism. There may be literacy solution teams so that they are focused on, again, a broader perspective rather than a very narrow targeted skill. We have building solution teams and our secondary schools, because they are content-driven, are looking at content or department teams,” explained Brackenhoff.

“We've had reboots, we've had extra support from our state support team, we've had new administrators come in, but that original concept of a small group of teachers with a teacher-based team just wasn't giving us the kind of results that we've seen since we've shifted to solution teams. It’s a lot easier to know I've got a problem and our group is working on finding a solution, added Brackenhoff.

Solution teams address a host of issues identified as problem areas through the extensive and ongoing review of data. These include, for example, low attendance, poor student engagement, inconsistent instruction in phonological skills across classrooms, chronic understaffing related to students with extensive support needs and the potentially unsafe environments it creates, limited vocabulary on the part of some students, and many more. Fairborn Primary School sample Solution Team problem statements from 2023- 24 are illustrated below.

The use of solution teams helped with teacher buy-in as well as shifting the focus of the teams’ work from a focus on compliance to a sustained focus on instructional improvement and student learning. Van Hoose explains: “A couple of us went to some OLAC training and we focused our solution teams on making longer commitments than was typical for shorter cycle TBTs. That shift has helped build some amazing, incredible tools, like those that helped with our writing OST assessments, that the teachers are using and looking deeper at their data or their problem that they're trying to solve and sustaining attention and focus on the problems they’re working to address. It was giving some freedom of choice within the solution teams, but also making sure that teams knew the commitment was long-term that made a difference and mattered to the teachers ed. And it did make a huge difference with our solution teams!”

Principal as midfielders. Principals play a pivotal role in all district and school efforts that lead to improvements in teaching and learning. The role of principals in Fairborn City Schools is no exception; however, the district has been intentional in using a distributed or shared leadership approach that recognizes that all personnel have a role in leading for improvement.

“We're kind of the middleman in between all the different plans,” explained Stephanie Reynolds, Principal of Fairborn Middle School. There are four principals at the middle school and eight solution teams in operation to address a variety of important issues. Each principal staffs two solution teams. Reynolds explains:

Despite an increasing number of children referred for multi-factored evaluations during the pandemic, district leaders are working to reverse that pattern by building teacher capacity to instruct and intervene effectively based on their ongoing use of student data. “Our classroom teachers are better equipped to recognize student learning progressions, and rather than waiting for failure before referring students for support, they’re more in tune to providing the ongoing intervention. One of the greatest things resulting from our work is the progress monitoring that’s occurring at the teacher level. Whereas before it was kind of ‘wait til they fail, take them to a team, hope the team will come up with a solution,’ now with teachers more engaged with their own classroom and student data, they’re able to provide more timely support to students,” explained Brackenhoff.

Walker agreed: In the non-academic area, “we’re asking deeper questions and better questions of what's the root cause of this behavior? Unless you're asking these questions and you're seeing improvement of behavior and increased learning through the data and the collection of that data, you're not going to know what is causing this. And I think that buildings are starting to see in those asking questions.”

Use of tiered supports through a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) framework is supporting the district’s efforts to identify areas that need to be strengthened at tier one (universal core instruction for all learners), intervene early, and offer supports that don’t require students to be inaccurately identified as students with a disability. “We make sure that our teachers and our leadership teams understand that MTSS is not just single- faceted in looking at climate culture but that there is an academic component that helps to advance our agenda because we know that if we’re providing tier one core instruction with fidelity, we should be seeing better results. The majority of our focus certainly is on that adult implementation at tier one,” said Brackenhoff. She elaborated:

The district’s work has also brought staff together from all areas, leading to a sense of shared ownership for the success of all children.

As Reynolds explains, “our teachers are not waiting for an intervention specialist to come in and rescue them; they are implementing strategies that they can do. One particular child I’m thinking about was in an inclusive setting for math and had both a special education teacher and a regular ed teacher and both came to a meeting with his mother and talked about the supports that they had given this particular child with no IEP in place. Both took ownership over that child. He will be on the special education teacher's caseload, but we promote that every child belongs to all of us and It was just really refreshing to hear all the strategies that they had for mom and she was in tears knowing how much they had put in place for her child before the meeting.”

Trust among team members was bolstered by the fact that teachers got to know each other beyond their content area or grade level. “It created a new opportunity; we literally had people that say, ‘I met so-and-so. I've been in the same building with them for 15 years and I never really had a chance to talk to them.’ Getting to know each other fostered a true appreciation for the fact that we all work hard, that no particular grade level or content area works any harder than the other, and that together we all bring our unique perspectives,” said Brackenhoff.

“We became a kind of improvement family versus one focused on compliance of improvement,” she added.

References

Buckeye Association of School Administrators (BASA). (2022). Ohio's leadership development framework (3rd ed.). https://ohioleadership.org/storage/ocali-ims-sites/ocali-ims- olac/documents/13073-OLAC- Book-2021-WEB.pdf

For more information about Ohio School Report Cards, see https://reportcard.education.ohio.gov.

For more information about RIMPs, see https://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Learning-in-Ohio/Literacy/Reading- Improvement-Plans#FAQ3450.

For more information about structured literacy and Ohio’s Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement, go to: https://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Learning-in-Ohio/Literacy.