10 Struggling Schools to Get Extra Layer of MCPS Support

Ten "Innovation Schools" within Montgomery County Public Schools will receive "shoulder-to-shoulder" support from the system's central office under a new program that will work to close the achievement gap.

The new program, announced at the April 23 meeting of the Montgomery County Board of Education, will hire a new position—a chief school improvement officer—to work directly with the leadership staff at the selected schools. This dedicated central office position is new to the system's approach to working with struggling schools, said Deputy Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez.

"We're limiting the number of schools so that (the improvement officer) can be on the ground working shoulder-to-shoulder with the leadership team on their school improvement strategies," Schiavino-Narvaez told Patch.

MCPS is culling several pieces of data to select the pilot schools, which will be announced at the May 14 meeting of the school board. Key measures at certain grade levels, like whether children are reading as they should by 3rd grade and whether 5th and 8th graders have the reading and math skills that prepare them for the next level, are part of the equation, but so is demographic data.

"[We're] looking at any achievement gaps with African-American and Latino students, special education students, students on free and reduced meals," Schiavino-Narvaez said. "Looking at all of those indicators, slicing the data for gaps, performance and progress."

Schools that fall into the lowest 20 percent range for all of the data will make it on to the next level of selection, which parses more abstract data like "perception"—how do people feel about the school and are students engaged—and how schools are implementing their current plan for progress.

Once the new position is in place, schools will immediately begin work on the plan, Schiavino-Narvaez said.

MCPS has always offered support to schools that didn't do well on the Maryland State Assessment, but Schiavino-Narvaez said using only one test didn't tell the whole story of a school and some schools were receiving resources from the system that they didn't need.

"I had a school when I first came here that had an Achievement Steering Committee [the previous system of support for struggling schools]," said Schiavino-Narvaez, who started with MCPS as a community superintendent for the Northeast Consortium. "I found that they had made great progress over the past seven years [...] they didn’t really need the kind of support we were offering them."

"Now we’re taking a much more comprehensive approach," she said.