Context

Part A: My educational context

Note to the reader:  This section is lengthy! I've included a LONG personal narrative about my many years as an educator in a variety of contexts in order to explain why, during one magical year at Paxson, the combination of funding and staffing felt SO RIGHT and SO NOTEWORTHY.  It also explains why I felt as passionate as I did in defending this funding and staffing when they were on the chopping block.  If you don't have time to read all of it, you can skip to the double asterisks that appear after about 10 paragraphs to learn about the context that is most immediately relevant to this project!

I began my teaching career in 1996, with zero preparation or credentials in a bilingual public elementary school in North Philadelphia. I never cried in front of the kids, but most days I came close.  It was my first experience with unmitigated failure. 

Discovering there was enough about teaching that I enjoyed and could see myself some day getting good at – or at least better at – I applied for Teach for America. (TFA) The program would offer me some cursory initial training in the form of a summer boot camp. I'd be part of a cohort of new teachers, all of them as unqualified as I was and all of us working in under-resourced, under-funded schools that couldn’t find or retain qualified teachers.

I spent the next fifteen years teaching in bilingual and dual language programs in New York City.  I taught five different content areas at seven different grade levels in four different schools.  Along the way, I was accepted into the Teacher Recruitment Initiative, which was a collaboration between Teach for America, the New York City Board of Education, the New York State Education Department, and Bank Street College of Education. A small cohort of us earned our Master’s Degrees in Elementary Education at Bank Street.  Our course was fully funded. In exchange we agreed to extend our two-year TFA commitment another three years, teaching in schools and districts that were committed to using Bank Street’s child-centered, constructivist pedagogy.

By seven years into my career, I finally had an actual teaching qualification. I was teaching fourth grade at a school and in a district whose professional development model and coaching staff supported my growth and whose curricula offered my students the consistency within and between grades and the research-based approaches they needed to thrive.

Then the Mayor and the Superintendent took over the New York City Schools. They introduced sweeping reforms that would require all NYC schools to adopt new math and reading curricula.  My students were at last making amazing progress in the core content areas, and I was finally beginning to feel I knew what I was doing and was getting targeted professional development support to get better at it.  And now we were being told to abandon what was working at our school and start from scratch.  

Our school appealed the decision and asked for a waiver to continue with our existing program.  We explained how well our program was now working, how consistent the teaching, learning, and coaching were at and between each grade level, and how confident we were that our kids’ results on upcoming standardized tests would more than demonstrate the success of the curricula they were telling us to abandon.  The Department of Education denied our request based on the previous year’s test scores.

 A few months later, as we’d predicted, our students made impressive gains on the standardized tests.  At least one reporter called the school to ask how we’d done it.  But by then it was too late; our waiver request had been denied, and we’d already begun the process of rolling out the new mandated reading and math curricula, tossing out years’ worth of collaborative work and learning that was finally beginning to take root and produce the desired learning outcomes.

Feeling exhausted, disillusioned, and powerless, as well as frustrated with the demoralizing impact of high stakes standardized testing on my students,  I took a leave of absence. I worked part-time as a private tutor and as an adjunct professor in a teacher preparation program. I also went on to earn my MFA in Nonfiction Writing. 

After three years, I returned to full-time teaching. Unwilling to subject myself to the testing pressures and lack of curricular autonomy in elementary school teaching in New York City, I worked for one year as a middle school math teacher at a dual language school in East New York.  Then I joined the staff of the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELs) in Washington Heights, founded by some friends who were TFA alumni. During my time at WHEELs, which began as a school with three sixth and seventh grade classes and built its way up to twelfth grade, I worked as an eighth grade ELA teacher, then a seventh ELA grade teacher, then a high school AP Spanish Language Teacher and yoga teacher.  I went where I was needed as the school grew, and I once again found myself bouncing between positions for which I had neither qualifications nor experience. 

In 2011 major upheavals in my personal life prompted me to leave New York City.  I moved to Missoula, Montana, where I worked for one year at a preschool classroom in a dual language private school.  I was then hired to work at my current school, Paxson Elementary School, in large part because of my fluent Spanish and experience as a dual language and bilingual teacher. After one year teaching fourth grade, I spent eight years as a second grade dual language teacher. It is the longest stretch I have spent teaching the same grade level and content since I began my career over twenty-five years ago.  

**Paxson is a K-5 public school of approximately 475 students, of whom about 80% are white, 9% are Hispanic, 7% are American Indian, 2% are Asian, and 2% are black.  It is located in the city of Missoula, which is a university town with a population of around 75,000 people.  

Last year, our school, supported by our superintendent and the Missoula School Board, made the difficult decision to move away from our dual language Spanish immersion program towards a Spanish as a Second Language model. As a result, the 2022-23 school year brought major programmatic changes for the whole school, with every classroom teacher teaching a different academic program and at least one new core content area, and each grade level collaborating in new ways. It has been and will continue to be a heavy lift for all of us.  As much as it has been sad to give up a beloved, unique program with lots of demonstrated benefits, it has also been heartening to have refugee students return to our school, and to see our students with IEPs and major learning and/or behavioral challenges make tremendous strides in their reading and writing and math now that they are spending more of their day in English.   

I have never felt more challenged or more satisfied in my classroom. Nor have I ever worked more tirelessly. While I am passionate about speaking and teaching Spanish and have built a career from it, I am also passionate about the English language, and even more passionate about meeting the academic and emotional needs of every student in my class.  The transition to teaching English Language Arts, to teaching math in English, and to using English as the primary language of instruction for my second graders has been transformative.  I am able to connect with them more deeply on a personal level, and my ability to deliver content to them in a language they can understand has produced thrilling results. 

Another transformative element in my classroom over the last few years, the details of which will provide more context for this project, has been the fact that for three years our district has had ESSR funds to pay for both an academic and behavioral interventionist in every elementary school. Last year because I was teaching ELA  I had the privilege of partnering for the first time with the academic interventionist, Debbie Tipton.  She is a gifted, highly qualified and experienced special education teacher. I cannot overstate the positive impact of Debbie’s skills and her collaboration between classroom teachers on all of our students.  

Further, the support of our brilliant behavioral interventionist Kate Spencer was invaluable to the functioning of the whole school.  She met regularly with our most dys-regulated students to help them manage emotional challenges and trauma. Her skillful work with them not only benefited them, but it also significantly reduced interruptions in each of our classrooms, thereby relieving us of much of the stress of attending to kids in crisis while meeting the academic and emotional needs of the rest of the class.  Kate also met regularly with many of our Tier 1 students who, like all children, sometimes need targeted guidance and support to manage friendship challenges and “big feelings.”   In addition, she partnered with the teachers to help us navigate delicate and often time consuming communications with parents.  Kate’s position and the expertise with which she executed it lightened the demanding load of the classroom teachers and made immeasurably positive contributions to the culture and climate in each classroom and to the emotional well being of students, families, and staff. Having both interventionists – academic and behavioral – as a resource for all of us, felt as close to a magic bullet as I’ve seen in my teaching career.  A dear friend and esteemed colleague summarized it best when she said that thanks to Debbie and Kate, she could not remember a teaching year in her twenty-plus year career when she had felt more supported. 

Due to post-pandemic tightened belts at the local, state and national levels and the ESSR funding coming to an end, our district administrators proposed a budget to our school board this March that included a line-item cut at all nine elementary schools of one of the interventionist positions.  Elementary school principals were asked to choose between which of the two interventionists they would have to let go.   

Our staff was stunned. We and our students and families relied on both Debbie and Kate and knew that losing either one of them would be a major blow to our whole school community. During one of the busiest times of the school year, in the middle of completing report cards and preparing for parent-teacher conferences on top of daily the demands of our already very taxing transitional school year, our staff was confronted with the need to speak out against the proposed cuts.  A last minute shuffle to create, complete, and compile surveys to staff and families in support of keeping both interventionists resulted in an overwhelming outpouring of support and a handful of public comment letters to the board. Along with our school counselor, I spoke at a board meeting at 6pm on a Tuesday in late March, after a full day of teaching and two hours of parent teacher conferences, imploring the board to find a way to avoid cutting either position.

Our principal, who’d been supportive of and invested in our efforts to preserve both interventionists’ positions, wrote an email to the staff the following day updating us on the situation.  She let us know that the board members had been moved by our words, were not taking the decision lightly, and were committed to finding grant money to fund both positions for an additional year. However, the board would vote to approve the budget with its cuts to one interventionist position at each elementary school. Forced to make an excruciating choice, our principal opted to cut the behavioral interventionist position and keep the academic interventionist position.  In response, Kate, our brilliant behavioral interventionist, decided to give notice for the following year and begin the process of starting a private counseling practice.  She was unwilling to wait around to see if any funding for her position would materialize, which even if it did would only be for a year.  

For the second time in my career, at almost exactly the moment when all the elements seemed to have lined up just right in my classroom and school, external policy decisions brought a devastating hammer down on them.  When teachers spoke up in defense of what we knew to be working, our voices and professional opinions were discounted.  I felt a familiar sense of defeat, one that had caused me to take a leave of absence from teaching twenty years earlier.  Then as now I found myself powerless against administrative decisions that failed to consider and value the unique perspective of the teachers whose classrooms and students they directly impacted.  

I have had no choice but to accept that we have lost Kate to this year’s budget cuts. I am however not willing to accept the permanent loss of the behavioral interventionist position, which showed itself, in conjunction with the academic interventionist position, to be of vital importance to our students’ foundational academic skills and emotional well-being.   It is my great hope that this year-long capstone project will help me successfully advocate for a policy change that builds in guaranteed on-going funding for both a behavioral and academic interventionist at each elementary school.  

Part B: Connecting Self-Assessment to My Context

At the beginning of this project, I place myself at the developing stage in the overarching competency of personal effectiveness.  Last school year I relied on my strengths and confidence as a writer and public speaker and on the positive personal relationships I have built with our staff, our principal, our families when I took a leadership role in speaking out against the cuts to the interventionist positions,  A major growth area for me in the developing stage is that of responding with resilience to the demands of teacher leadership.  I struggled to manage my time and well-being as I advocated for myself, my colleagues and our students  and families while continuing to meet the demands and responsibilities of  full-time classroom teaching.  

I also place myself in the developing stage in the overarching competency of interpersonal effectiveness. I have demonstrated a clear vision for the profession (emerging stage) in my commitment to advocating for the interventionist positions. I have a lot of room to grow in how I create a shared vision with my colleagues in this effort and involve them in this advocacy work.

Part C: Connecting Assessment of Diverse Stakeholders to My Context

During my advocacy work in the spring of the 2022-2023 school year, I worked closely with my principal, with the academic interventionist, with fellow teachers, with our school counselor, and with the parents of students in my class, in order to highlight the critical importance and positive impacts of the work of our two interventionists.  I attended and spoke at the school board meeting in March, 2023, and submitted survey results from interviews with staff members and families as public comments to the board.  I also encouraged parents and staff members to submit their own letters to the board.  

I hope through the TLI process to find ways to make this kind of advocacy work more sustainable, manageable, and impactful while at the same time ensuring that I fulfill my professional teaching commitments and maintain my own health and wellbeing.

My work thus far has allowed me to begin to understand the nuanced, complicated, and demanding work that the school district administration and school board members must take on as they balance difficult budget and program decisions.  I am aware that what I am asking for is by no means easily granted and is just one of a myriad of challenges that confront school leadership.  I also bring a strong awareness of and commitment to the academic and emotional needs of the students in my class and their families, from the most under-resourced members of my class to the most highly resourced members.   All of them deserve the very best academic program and the most comprehensive socio-emotional supports possible to meet them and serve them where they are