Part A
The challenge I have identified is to place qualified behavioral and academic interventionists in each of our elementary schools and to fund the positions on an on-going basis. While this goal is obviously not one I will be able to achieve this year, it is the “true north” that will guide my work in the Capstone Project. As I explained in my Context section, having both interventionists in our school in in the 2022-2023 academic year was a game changer for students, families, teachers, and administration, and the most effective approach I'd seen in my more than two decades of teaching. Realizing that we were losing the ESSR funds and would soon in all likelihood lose not one but both positions felt like a call to action.
The stakeholders are basically every student, teacher, and staff member at our school and at others in the district, as well as the families of all of our students. Before the line item budget cuts in March, we experienced a brief, magical period when ESSR/pandemic fundings and great hiring created conditions in our school community that felt like the elusive "Just Right" combination of elements. Families felt seen and heard. Teachers felt supported, effective, and way less burnt out. Our students were having their academic and emotional/behavorial needs met in ways I’d never seen happen before.
The conclusion I draw from what we experienced is that we hit on something that worked, and we need to find a way to bring it back to our school and other schools. We need to find a way to fund these positions and to prioritize continuing to provide academic and behavioral interventions early in students’ schooling for the benefit of all members of the community. It works. We saw it work. These positions should be funded and sustained and valued.
As the documents and artifacts I've included below show, the challenge I take on in my Capstone is one that deeply impacts our students, their families, and our classroom teachers, support staff and administrators. In creating and funding the two interventionist roles, our school found an amazing, sustainable way to meet the academic, emotional, and behavioral needs of our students, something I had never experienced in my nearly quarter century as an educator. The artifacts include: testimonials, survey responses. from a small sampling of the families whose children benefitted from the interventionists and testimonials and survey results from school staff about how transformative it was to have both interventionists supporting every aspect of our work.
As far as developing in the overarching competency of personal effectiveness, my experiences in the spring of 2023 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 possibly expect myself single handedly to find a way to “fix” the funding problem and restore the interventionist positions in our district. This outcome 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.
It is my intention through this work and through qualitative data I have gathered and will continue to gather, that in collaboration with other stakeholders we will eventually bring about a major shift in what we collectively expect and demand our schools will accomplish. I hope that through our information and testimonials, we can make a compelling case for what is possible -- even non-negotiable -- in our classrooms and schools. In doing so, I hope we can convince our district administrators, our school boards, our association, and our local, state and national legislators that what the successes we achieved during that one remarkable year are replicable and must be replicated via the long-term funding of highly skilled behavioral and academic interventionists in each school!
Links to resources and artifacts
Notes/Data that our principal presented at a board meeting about the reach and impact of the work of the behavioral interventionist and the academic interventionist (Material gathered and compiled by Kate Farnes and Debbie Tiption, two Paxson staff members)
My letter to colleagues about the survey
My letter to the board with staff survey results
Parent Letter 1 to the board in support of funding interventionist positions
Paxson Teacher Petrea Torma's letter to the board
Paxson Teacher Autumn Johnstone's letter to the board
Part B
I will focus on the Overarching Competencies of Personal Effectiveness and Interpersonal Effectiveness. Here's what I wrote during Module I coursework about why I chose these and where I placed myself within them:
"At the beginning of this project, I place myself at the developing stage in the overarching competency of personal effectiveness. This 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."
I chose the foundational competency of "Collaborate Purposefully" versus the "Explore and Challenge Inequity" competency. The latter competency is critically important and has a been a defining part of the choices I've made throughout my career, including spending my first fifteen years working in under-resourced urban communities of color and subsequently advocating while at Paxson for refugee families and students with IEPs as we navigated the difficult transition away from our Dual Language Spanish Immersion model. For the purposes of this Capstone Project, the former competency has felt more salient and relevant to what I hope to accomplish moving forward.
If I think of district administration and the school board as a different “culture” from mine, I hope to develop leadership in two areas. The first is "recognize the need for flexibility, adaptation and cross-cultural communication skills when interacting with other cultural groups." The second is "Recognize interactions with individuals and groups of different cultural backgrounds rather than [my]rown because of [my] intentional desire to understand different perspectives.
The Leadership Pathway competency I will focus on is "advocacy." I hope to develop an understanding of how to gather information from various stakeholders and present it in a way that is useful and informative and that helps build momentum and participation to bring about change.
This year and beyond I will work with former and current parents of students in my classroom, with my colleagues, and with my school and district administration. I look forward to developing working relationships with our members of our school board and our local and state level legislators. The major resources I need to address are funding and programming. Via conversations with these stack holders, via articles and resources such as this one from the Montana Free Press, and via presentations live and recorded such as this one, I hope to develop greater understanding of the school funding formula in Montana in order to advocate for reforms in funding that will benefit our students and schools.