I'm sad to report that at the time of this writing I have implemented only one of the many ambitious steps I laid out in my action plan. I DID conduct an empathy interview with my principal, Julie Robitaille, linked here. (evidence)
My original aim of working towards restore funding to the interventionist positions got completed overtaken by major enrollment declines in 2023-2024 and resulting budget cuts. Not only was there no clear pathway to get these interventionists back, we were also confronted with sweeping cuts and the loss of five non-tenured teachers and at least one paraprofessional at our school alone. These cuts, and others that were even more extreme, impacted schools across the district and the state. My orginal impetus for this project (the loss of interventionists) became the tip of the iceberg in the face of these cuts, and others which will happen next year as we lose at least one more classroom teacher.
To say that the wind went out of my sails is an understatement. Instead of continuing to advocate for a restoration of these positions in the face of much larger inevitable cuts, I devoted energy to supporting my colleagues on staff who knew that their positions were being cut, who had no other job prospects immediately on the horizon, and who, with the exception of one disgruntled colleague, showed up to work every day committed to meeting the needs of their students. I stopped by their classrooms, and on multiple occasions, became a shoulder for them to cry on. I offered to write letters of references for them, and checked in on them regularly to see how they were holding up. Our staff as a whole was gutted to lose them, and devastated on their behalf and that of their students and their students' families. We spent time during our "Culture and Climate" meetings after school and via email to figuring out how best to support them and how to honor them at the end of the school year. I created a padlet and invited staff members to contribute to it, and we shared with them on the last day of school. To protect the privacy of the recipients and writers of the messages, I will not provide a link to the padlet. Instead I have cut and pasted the messages into this document (evidence) and have redacted names and identifying details. While two of our colleagues were able to secure other jobs by the end of the school year, the rest were not. I will share with administrators and legislators a version of this padlet, which over and over again highlights in painful detail the devastating impact of staff cuts to individuals, students, classrooms, families, and schools.
With regard to how I used the the chosen competencies in the implementation of my project, I am excerpting the following from my Needs Assessment Green Phase assignment:
As far as developing in the overarching competency of personal effectiveness, my experiences in the spring and my reflections on them during the summer and in the TLI program so far have allowed me to gain a very necessary perspective that I believe is contributing to my growth in this area. I can now see clearly (thanks in part to a conversation I had during a break-out zoom group during our October meeting) that I cannot expect myself single handedly to find a way to “fix” the funding problem and restore the interventionist positions in our district. This is way beyond my individual capability and job responsibility. However, I can use my position as a known and respected senior teacher at Paxson, my years of teaching experience, and my diverse background as a teacher at a wide variety of schools, grade levels, and content areas to gather data from stakeholders and speak from personal experience about how very effective the funded positions were. My hope is that the data I am well placed to collect and present will serve as an eventual catalyst for policy shifts and long term change. In limiting my goal to a more realistic one, I am also strengthening my ability to respond with resilience. Setting myself a more attainable, manageable goal will make it much easier for me to stay grounded and resilient and care for myself versus getting lost in frustration and overwhelm in the face of a much larger and more unwieldy challenge.
In the overarching competency of interpersonal effectiveness, the work so far has given me practice in communicating in writing and in person with colleagues, families, my administration, and the board. The TLI is helping me to clarify my role in advocating for the interventionist positions, thus making me more intentional and effective.
As clearly outlined above, the major obstacle I encountered was that the cuts to the interventionists' positions was a drop in the bucket compared to the sweeping, devastating cuts that followed. I addressed this obstacle, again as outlined above, by putting my advocacy for the interventionist positions on hold while committing to making plans to carefully document and share what I refer to in the "Design" section as "this amazing moment at our school when all the pieces fit together."
The major change I'd make to the Capstone Project's action plan would be to see it less as a plan to bring about immediate change and rather as a achievable data-gathering plan. Instead of viewing the project as one that would restore at least a million dollars in yearly funding during a time of budget shortfalls and major cuts, it would have been far less daunting, and likely far more impactful, to design it as project that captured, from the perspective of multiple stakeholders, the magic that happened at our school during the 2022-2023.