Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT October

Welcome to our monthly gallery of best practices and tools from your Center for High School Success partner schools in Oregon and Washington. Below, your coaches have collected timely tools and featured practices from across our region to help support you, your team, and your 9th graders! Please reach out to your coach if you have any questions, feedback, on input.

October 2024

Happy October, 9th Grade Champions!  The mornings are a bit chillier, and the sun is coming up later and later. Classrooms are full of demure, cozy freshmen adjusting to their new surroundings. Most of us have been in school 6-8 weeks and the first grade marking period looms just ahead. (Did that just take a spooky turn?) 

Our first year schools are deep in the joy and complexities of establishing new teams and practices.  We want to celebrate and appreciate all the new team leads, new team members, new data champions and new admins to the work. We had lots of folks attend our optional trainings for team leads, data champions and new team members! If you weren’t able to join us, and want to go through the materials, check out the Timely Tool section!

CHSS News: Washington State OSPI Update

Data Sharing Expectations for the Ninth Grade Success Grant

We want to make reporting data easy for you. Throughout the project we’ll be tracking your data and trends across the network so that we can make adjustments and offer just in time support. The easiest way for our team to track your progress is for you to provide a login to your student information system platform (HomeRoom) to your coach and to our evaluators from Education Analytics Consulting.

  • If your district requires a data sharing agreement, you’ll need to email this attachment to your CHSS coach, and David Knight from Education Analytics Consulting. 
  • Data managers at each school will need to email Meghan Perez-Navarro at HomeRoom to request logins and passwords with coaching level access for their CHSS Coach and David KnightIf you don’t create these logins, your grant funds may be stopped.   
  • If you don’t have HomeRoom dashboard:  
  • You can grant access to your student information system in a similar way.
  • We also have a template you can use to report your data manually each quarter.  
  • We are only interested in the ninth-grade data and are specifically interested in ninth-grade course grades, attendance, and discipline data, along with corresponding demographic information (race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status), or enrollment classification (IEP, ELL, etc.).  
  • We will send a link to a secure data-sharing portal where you can upload de-identified ninth-grade data.  
  • In sharing the data with our evaluators, please remember to de-identify students’ Personally Identifiable Information by deleting student names and replacing personally identifiable student ID numbers with randomly generated Research ID numbers. Should you need it, David would be happy to share a quick how-to guide for generating random IDs for students, and we’ve also got a guide available to help. 

If you have questions about this, we are happy to help. Feel free to email kefi.andersen@k12.wa.us

Educational Grant Management System (EGMS) Office Hours Tuesdays and Thursdays

Our Educational Grant Management System is new this year. We are still learning the system and want to help you get comfortable with it too!

Get Assistance with:

  • EGMS access and technical issues
  • Navigating EGMS
  • Budget amendments and payment requests
  • Grant applications and progress reports

Tuesdays from 10:00-11:00 am (Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88033044818)

Thursdays from 1:00-2:00 pm (Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82230019925)

Email for support anytime: EGMS.Support@k12.wa.us

Use Your Funds

The Ninth Grade Success Grant requires school staff to compensate Ninth Grade Success team members for their time first. Some schools have taken this a step further and provided a .2 FTE for the Team Lead to prepare for meetings and follow up with students and their folks.

This year’s grant is state funded. All grantees can use the funds for expenses starting July 1, 2024 once their grant is approved. Grantees have until June 30, 2025 to spend their funds.  

The grant funds can be used for a variety of expenses associated with ninth grade success.

Examples include: 

  • Substitute teacher expenses for Ninth Grade Success team to attend professional learning or to take part in planning.  
  • Travel costs for team to attend professional learning. 
  • HomeRoom Ninth Grade Success Data Dashboard.
  • School scheduling supports. 
  • Apps that capture feedback from students, families, and community members.  

Funds may also go to support ninth grade students and team needs. Examples include: 

  • Community-based organization partnership to provide additional supports such as: tutoring or mentoring. 
  • Summer bridge events. For example, orientation week staffing or transportation. 
  • Laptops, Hot Spots, calculators for students that need them to access education. 
  • Cover costs of supports for ninth grade students’ families that will help students be successful. For example, transportation, school fees or fines. 
  • Food or materials for family engagement nights or team meetings. 
  • Incentives (restaurant gift cards, sports fees, ASB cards, school logo gear, movie tickets, etc.) Incentives may NOT include cash gift cards. The value of these items should not exceed $50. 

If you have questions about this, we are happy to help. Feel free to email kefi.andersen@k12.wa.us

Calendar

National CHSS Events: Learning Lab @ McDaniel HS, October 17 8:30am – 3pm. Learn more here and register here. Space is limited, register early.

Regional Fall Collaborations: Register for all Washington Fall Collaboratives here. Register for the Oregon Fall Collaborative here. Each member needs to register individually. 

  • Central Washington #2(Moses Lake): Thursday, October 17
  • Puget Sound: Tuesday, October 22
  • NW Washington: Thursday, October 24
  • SW Washington: Thursday, October 24
  • Oregon: Salem,  Thursday November 21 

Regional Winter Collaborations: Registration links coming soon! 

  • WA Virtual Collaborative:
    • Session A: February 25 and 26, 2025, 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom
    • Session B: March 3, and 4, 2025, , 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom 
  • Oregon Virtual Collaborative: Wednesday, February 18 and 20, 2025, 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom

Regional Spring Collaborations: Registration links coming soon!

  • Central WA #2 (Moses Lake): Thursday, April 24 
  • Oregon/Portland Area: Wednesday, April 23 
  • Puget Sound: Thursday, May 1
  • Central WA #1 (Yakima): Tuesday, May 6
  • Northwest: Thursday, May 8
  • Southwest: Thursday, May 8

Timely Tools

Improvement as a Journey

This article from HTH Unboxed, Improvement as a Journey: Going the Distance with Improvement Science highlights our work as problem solvers and offers advice to avoid the common potholes of solutionitis, analysis paralysis, and focusing on individuals and not systems. Then it follows the story of a fictional school as they identify a need for increased family engagement and take a journey to get there. 

Team Lead Tool Kit

At the Team Lead Training in September, we talked about the Team Lead role using the Phased Roadmap.

We went over the Phase 1 Checklist.

We talked about the importance of an action-oriented running agenda and offered this template:   TEMPLATE 9GST Running Agenda .docx

And we looked at the CHSS Yearlong Planner.

Data Champion Guide

Data Champions make the world go ‘round! As Donald Berwick says, “‘some’ is not a number and ‘soon’ is not a time.” It’s our data champions that help us stay grounded in the data, and for that we are grateful! To learn more about this important role, check out the Data Champion training slide deck here and this short Data Champion Guide.

Featured Practice

Making the Invisible Visible: Interventions That Help Students “Do School” Better

Use Door Signs to make grading policies and support clear! Door Signs are answers to students most frequently asked questions answered in a common visual format, posted outside the teacher’s door.  Many schools made a push to have Door Signs posted by the time families came in for conferences or curriculum nights.  Here are a few examples:

Did you know that most students who are off-track in the first trimester/semester have only 1 fail? Help teachers see the students who are only failing one class by sending 1F emails. Here is a script to get you started. This strategy makes it easy for teachers to see the students that are experiencing success in most classes and get them quickly back on track.  Another strategy is to offer support for students to make a plan. Evergreen HS uses this 1F Action Plan to support students as they make a plan.

Make implicit expectations explicit. White Swan created this flyer to support students as they work to get their grades up.

Previous SNAPSHOTS

  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT DECEMBER
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT November
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT October
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT September
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT August
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT June
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT May
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT April
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT March
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT January/February
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT December
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
  • Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT November
    As we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share: