Amid stagnant progress, this Fort Worth ISD school shows signs of growth
On a hot morning last week, Karen Ayala walked down a row of about a dozen second-graders lined up outside Sagamore Hill Elementary School, handing out trowels and cultivators.
Switching seamlessly between English and Spanish, Ayala, a bilingual teacher, talked to the kids about planting depth and spacing guidelines for the beet seeds they’d sprouted on damp paper towels in their classroom. Then, it was time to plant.
“Who has the seeds?” Ayala asked.
A girl brought a paper towel lined with seeds forward, and Ayala showed her how to prepare a spot for them in the raised bed, digging out a shallow rectangle running parallel with the edge of the bed. The girl laid the paper towel out and covered it with about a half inch of soil.
With enough sun, plenty of water and a bit of luck, Sagamore Hill should have a beet crop in a few weeks. It’s a lesson school leaders hope kids take with them back to the classroom — with hard work, patience and plenty of help from their teachers, they’ll see growth, as well.
Sagamore Hill is one of several bright spots highlighted in the Fort Worth Independent School District’s recent self-reported A-F accountability scores. Although letter grades can offer an overly simplistic look at a reality that’s more complex — Sagamore Hill made rapid progress in some areas, but continues to struggle in others — district leaders say they want to build on that success and use it as an example of how other struggling campuses can turn around.
STAAR scores point to progress, ongoing challenges
Sagamore Hill is one of a few campuses Fort Worth ISD officials are pointing to as examples of progress in a district where academic growth has otherwise been slow to take shape. The school, located in the Meadowbrook neighborhood, moved from an F rating last year to a B rating this year, in accountability ratings calculated by Fort Worth ISD and confirmed with the Texas Education Agency.
The school’s state test scores point to signs of progress: In fifth-grade math, the number of kids who met grade level jumped 13 percentage points over last year. Last school year’s fifth-graders also saw an 11-point gain in the number of students scoring on grade level in reading compared to how that same cohort of students fared as fourth-graders the year before.
But despite that progress, the school still struggles in some key areas. The school posted a four-point decline in third-grade reading, falling from 27% of students reading on grade level to just 23%. That places the campus behind the district as a whole, which itself lags behind the rest of the state. Education researchers say third-grade reading is an important metric because students who can’t read proficiently by then are less likely to catch up and more likely to struggle in school later on.
Sagamore Hill opened its garden last year. After several years of lackluster academic performance, Principal Pamela Carrick said school leaders wanted to reinforce the concept of growth for students. So they used grant money to buy 10 raised beds and enough soil to fill them. With help from the Tarrant County Master Gardener Association, they picked a spot just outside the building, just up from the school’s parking lot, where plants would get plenty of sunlight.
The garden was just one part of a larger effort to get students to think about growth, Carrick said. All along the building’s hallways, school leaders hung posters and signs reminding students that no matter where they’re starting from, there’s always room to grow. Teachers talked with students about building on what they’d already learned and continuing to make progress.
“Everything that we did last year was based on growing every day,” she said.
School leaders also worked with teachers on how to use student data to see which students needed extra support, and what that support could look like, Carrick said. At the end of a lesson, teachers have students answer a few questions about material they just covered. Teachers can then quickly see which students understood the material and which didn’t. They can then pull students who got the question wrong into a smaller group to go over the lesson again.
Data-driven instruction has been a major point of emphasis in Fort Worth ISD for several years. But Carrick said Sagamore Hill has been more consistent about collecting and using that data over the past two years. As teachers do it more often, it becomes habitual, and they get better at it, she said.
Leaders point to Sagamore Hill, Springdale as examples of growth
Besides Sagamore Hill, district leaders have also pointed to Springdale Elementary School as another example of progress. Springdale also improved from an F rating last year to a B this year.
Like Sagamore Hill, Springdale’s test scores point to signs of growth — the school posted a 12-point gain in the number of fourth-graders meeting grade level in reading. In math, the school saw a 34-point increase in the number of fourth-graders meeting grade level, climbing from 20% last year to 54% this year.
But also like Sagamore Hill, Springdale saw signs of decline. In third grade, the school saw a 16-point drop in the number of students meeting grade level in math, and a 17-point decline in reading.
During a school board meeting this month, Mohammed Choudhury, the district’s deputy superintendent of learning and leading, said the district needs to improve consistency across all its campuses so the kind of growth Sagamore Hill and Springdale saw last year is the norm, not the exception.
Choudhury, who came to the district about a month ago, said the district is “kicking butt” in terms of academic outcomes — a descriptor he repeated about a half dozen times. He told the board the district needs to continue building momentum, and said the best way to improve academic performance for all students is not through special programs or interventions, but through high-quality Tier I instruction — that is, the core instruction that teachers deliver to their entire classes.
“You cannot intervene your way to narrowing the achievement gap,” he said.
FWISD test scores show stagnant achievement
But a look at the district’s state test scores paints a less rosy picture. In 2015, just 28% of Fort Worth ISD’s students across all grades and subjects tested on grade level on the STAAR exams. Last year, the district performed just one percentage point better. That means nearly three-quarters of the district’s students aren’t where they need to be academically.
Fort Worth ISD leaders have come under fire over the past month over stagnant student achievement. Last month, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker sent letters to each board member, calling on them to do more to improve academic performance. During the public comment period of the board’s Aug. 27 meeting, Parker called for a “bold, unified approach” to turning the district around, saying the responsibility belongs not only to the board and district leaders, but also to the city more broadly.
Earlier this month, district officials released self-calculated A-F accountability scores showing the district would have a C rating once official ratings are released. The Texas Education Agency is barred from releasing letter grades under a court order issued last month. Fort Worth ISD officials said they calculated district and campus scores using the agency’s formula.
On Tuesday, a week after releasing the self-calculated scores, the district sent its numbers to TEA for confirmation. The agency pointed out a number of areas where the district’s calculations were incorrect. Fort Worth ISD officials said the district’s overall letter grade wouldn’t change under the revised numbers. District officials think only one campus — World Languages Academy — could see a letter grade change, falling from an A to a B. Sagamore Hill and Springdale’s letter grades remained unchanged.
Also last week, the board met in closed session to discuss Superintendent Angélica Ramsey’s performance. The board took no action on Ramsey’s contract, and board President Roxanne Martinez wouldn’t comment on details of the discussion. But several community members, including a number of teachers, told the board the district needs a change in leadership.
In garden and classroom, Sagamore Hill hopes to build on growth
Standing in the garden at Sagamore Hill last week, second-graders Diego Pasquez and Spencer Richards took turns watering a bed of lettuce seeds. Diego helped with the garden last year, and once it was ready for harvest, he got to eat some of the lettuce he helped grow. Working in a garden was a new experience for him, he said — his family lives in an apartment, so there’s no room to grow anything at home. But now that he’s used to it, he likes spending time in the garden.
“It’s like my new home,” he said.
A few feet away, Carrick, the principal, looked at a raised bed that was still filled with plants students put there last school year. One viney plant sprawled across the bed and out onto the ground. Carrick puzzled for a moment about what the plant was. Then, she walked around to the other side of the bed and spotted a respectably sized watermelon. She twisted it off the vine and handed it to students nearby, who marveled at its size.
At first glance, the rest of the garden beds looked empty. But in a couple of weeks, students should see new seedlings beginning to sprout. A few weeks after that, they should have fresh vegetables, ready to pick. That’s a lesson Carrick wants the kids to take away from the project — growth takes hard work and time, but it’s possible.
“It’s OK wherever you start,” she said. “We just need to make sure we keep moving and keep growing.”
This story was originally published September 23, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
