Seattle
The State of Washington used State Fiscal Stabilization Funds available under ARRA to supplant, on a one-for-one trade-out, previously programmed state funds for education. Title I and IDEA stimulus funds will be used to revamp Seattle Public Schools’ English language learner (ELL) services; to support grade-span coaches; to enhance student data-tracking systems; to support professional development; to invest in technology and early childhood; and to build out performance management data systems.
Specifically, the district anticipates using Title I funds for performance management through an initial implementation of a differentiated school improvement model, a science, technology, engineering, and math high school, early learning, and bilingual education. Seattle Public Schools is still developing additional spending items for its Title I ARRA program.
The district has outlined a new, predictable, and consistent way of providing differentiated responses to schools based on performance. This means that schools struggling in math may receive different supports and interventions than schools struggling with reading. ARRA will further the district’s ability to provide targeted resources where schools need them most, which is critical to the district being able to meet its goals.
This performance management approach to school improvement provides the framework for making system-wide improvements. In 2009-10, 12 schools will participate in this effort (five of them Title I schools), and over the next three years, the district will provide these differentiated supports to every school, within allowable funding sources for each school. The initiative will provide differentiated and targeted supports to the current 24 Title I schools based on their performance and diagnosed needs. The five Title I schools participating in the first phase of the performance management implementation will receive more intense support than the other 19 schools, but all Title I schools will receive targeted enrichment support. This support will vary from school to school, but will focus on improving student academic performance and be aligned with each school’s commitment to academic excellence.
ARRA Title I funds will help these efforts by directly supporting incremental site-based staff (coaches, teachers, content specialists); professional development/teacher training and the associated release time to support additional training on assessments; effective use of data; and academic interventions. Funding will also be used to support an extended-day program, supplemental materials, diagnostic assessments, and a strengthened family engagement program. Many of the interventions planned with ARRA funding will require hiring additional staff, thus creating employment opportunities and helping to preserve teacher and coaching positions.
ARRA Title I funds will also be used to revamp the bilingual services department. The goal of Seattle Public Schools’ bilingual services is to foster language development (through explicit instruction with English as a second language [ESL]) certified teachers) that will empower English language learners to succeed in the mainstream curriculum. The district is hoping to achieve this goal by sharing the expertise and knowledge of Seattle’s ESL certified teachers with mainstream teachers through collaboration and professional development.
The district is also proposing a differentiated model of service delivery to better meet the needs of its bilingual students and to better support all staff. Schools will be grouped based both on the number and type of services needed at that school and on schools’ current readiness to support English language learners. This grouping will allow the district to more efficiently allocate staff and resources to where the greatest needs are.
To make this transition to a differentiated service model, the district must hire additional bilingual coaches to train certificated school leaders over the next two years—a natural fit considering the spending time frame for ARRA funds. These coaches will build site-based capacity to manage the services. The district is also increasing bilingual certificated staff and relying less heavily on instructional assistants. By identifying, hiring, and training more certificated staff, Seattle Public Schools can build and create a model that can be sustained and better meet the needs of bilingual students.
The ultimate beneficiaries of this new model will be the district’s 5,600 bilingual students who are currently struggling to meet standards with inadequate district supports. In the new model, students have the benefit of a bilingual-endorsed teacher who can provide explicit instruction for longer periods of the day and collaborate with the mainstream teachers. Certificated teachers and instructional assistants will also benefit from the high-quality professional development and guidance from bilingual coaches. ARRA funds will be specifically used to pay for bilingual instructional assistants, school-based certificated staff, central-office staff, as well as for additional hours of staff work for collaboration on student assessment, instructional design, and parent and family engagement.
A third priority for the district’s ARRA plan is expanding and improving the early learning opportunities for low-income students in the city. To do this, Seattle schools are working in partnership with the City and local funders to develop a citywide plan to add integrated Pre-K-3 programs to several low-income Seattle schools, with the goal of having a program in every Title I elementary or K-8 school that has the physical capacity within five years.
Core elements of this program would include high-quality, universally accessible prekindergarten programs that are available to all children whose families want them to participate (a sliding fee may be charged), as well as full-day kindergarten. Professional development in early education and common planning time enable teachers to plan for effective coordination across and between grades, and will help ensure that educators throughout the district are following aligned standards and curricula that allow each year’s learning to build on what children learned the previous year.
In addition, ARRA funding will be used to create a yearly evaluation and ongoing quality assessment of the early childhood programs; a kindergarten readiness assessment to inform how elementary schools can support every five-year-old entering school; and an evaluation of the program with annual impact assessment briefs. Measuring the return on investment of the program and communicating results with policy makers and the public are important tasks for the district to undertake in order to track, measure, and communicate the impact of the program. Policies and practices will also be put into place that involve parents and communities and foster a shared accountability for the educational success of Pre-K to third-grade students.
Seattle Public Schools has also planned to establish an integrated Pre-K-3 program in at least 20 additional Title I elementary schools within five years. These programs should be high-quality and result in significant, positive student academic gains that directly reduce the achievement gap. The district has scheduled 2009-10 as the planning year and targeted the 2010-11 school year for launching the effort. There are specific planning and launch costs for which the district will use Title I ARRA funds. These costs include salary and benefits for a director of early learning for two years; a kindergarten readiness assessment and related data module; strategic planning assistance to lead design and development of an early learning plan for the City and the school district; and outreach, engagement, and information dissemination to affected families and communities. The district has planned that, by year three, the continuing costs will be fully assumed by existing funding sources.
The district will also use Title I funding for instructional and content coaching, professional development, and family engagement activities for private schools serving Title I students, as well as to cover the loss of state funding (known as I-728) for activities such as class size, professional development, and extended time in Title I schools.
The district’s special education department is planning to use federal IDEA stimulus funds to implement recommendations from reviews conducted by the Urban Special Education Leadership Collaborative. The recommendations focused on the three major areas of service delivery, transition, and organizational structure. Stimulus funds will be used to implement and review recommendations across these three major areas, which are critical to the special education department’s ability to support the work of the strategic plan.
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