Some ‘tough love’ at Hall
SPRING VALLEY — Pop quiz: As of Sept. 9, how many of Hall High School’s 94 freshman students were failing at least one class? The answer: 27.
By the middle of this week, that number had been whittled down to 19, according to district records. Overall, Hall’s goal this year is to have fewer than 14 freshman students failing any course – a magic number which has been prominently displayed on Superintendent Mike Struna’s office door.
So, how does Hall plan to meet that goal?
According to administrators, this year the district is swooping in with prompt, data-driven academic interventions for freshman students who don’t make the grade. Plus, Hall teachers are issuing detentions to freshmen who turn in late or sloppy homework.
Principal Tony Valente said he’d recently walked into one of Hall’s science rooms after school, only to find “15 or 20 kids” in homework detention.
“I was not proud to see that many kids,” Valente told Hall School Board this week. “But I was proud to see our teachers holding kids accountable.”
Student accountability is a big facet of the school improvement plan Hall is promoting this year. Struna said just ask Hall’s teachers: They’re calling this year’s early goings in the classroom “tough love.”
“It’s a huge culture change for our students,” Valente said. “Most of our seniors are
saying, ‘I wish that program would have been here when I was a freshman. I wouldn’t have failed as many classes as I did.’”
Although Hall’s school improvement plan has a special focus on freshmen, Struna said it is designed to filter upward to the furthest reaches of the student body. The goal: Improved student test scores and bolstered academic achievement across the board.
Valente acknowledged the district’s new, strict policies have been “overbearing,” and said they’ve created a flood of paperwork for teachers. However, Struna predicted those headaches would lessen once students accept the new school culture.
“We knew it’d be a lot of work up front. It’s a battle of wills,” Struna told the BCR. “But we’re not going to let (students) fail.”
But it isn’t all stiff upper lip and hardline academic enforcement at Hall.
This year, Struna and Valente said administrators will take a shoe-leather approach. They’ve planned informal, daily classroom visits they say will allow administrators to learn which instructional formats strike a chord with students – and which ones need fine tuning.
Said Struna: “We’ll get a better understanding of what’s going on in classrooms. We can share some ideas ... it’ll lead to teachers talking to each other and saying, ‘I heard you had a good beginning of your lesson: What did you do?’ We’re hoping this creates dialogue.”
Meanwhile, the board and Hall Education Association are mulling an addendum to the teacher union contract which could allow fewer annual teacher reviews in favor of more informal assessments throughout the year.
“What happens is we (administrators) spread ourselves thin, and we’re not doing a good job of anything,” Struna said of the district’s current, paperwork-laden annual review process.
The measure could allow district administrators to give each teacher four or five informal reviews per year, in return for tenured teachers receiving only one formal performance review every two years.
In other business:
• Hall is planning a “vision meeting” this year, in part to promote the district’s new approaches to curriculum and instruction. District officials have said they’ll start contacting select members of the public next week to solicit interest for the symposium.
Invites to the symposium will form discussion panels for educational and non-educational aspects of the district. Tentatively, the “vision meeting” is slated for Oct. 28, although a definite time has not yet been chosen.
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