Schedule change coming to CV elementary, middle schools

Elementary and middle school students in the Central Valley School District will start school an hour later on Thursdays in the fall.

The Central Valley School Board voted unanimously on May 22 to allow collaboration time during the regular school day beginning Sept. 14.

Two years ago the district’s high schools built collaborative time into their schedules.

Collaborative time gives teachers, staff and administrators an hour of uninterrupted time each week to meet to focus on students’ strengths, challenges and ways to improve their academic success.

Dave Bouge, principal of Bowdish Middle School, tells parents they will like what they see and it will be worth their effort.

“They’re going to have to hang in there and trust us for a little while and I know that’s sometimes difficult to do, but it will pay off,” said Bouge.

Bouge gives an example on what happened three years ago when he was principal at North Pines Middle School and only 30 percent of the students were passing the WASL in reading.

“We had enough. Part of the problem was us. We weren’t teaching them in the right way and something was missing. Our kids weren’t passing and we needed to figure out why,” said Bouge.

The school applied for and received a three-year state Comprehensive School Reform grant. They began shifting their school’s culture from classroom-centered to student-centered.

“We discovered that our kids didn’t know how to read. A good part of the grant included collaboration time and our scores within three years went from low 30s to 71 percent. We went from the outhouse to the penthouse.

“That collaboration time put my teachers in a situation where everyday they had to think about specific students, what they were getting and what they were not getting. Collaboration time permits you to determine why they’re not getting it and you can deal with that in a different way. You can approach that child differently. I know it works, because I’ve watched it work,” said Bouge.

Bouge said they will give pre-tests to determine what students need to learn. They teach areas of weakness and then give a post-test. If the scores aren’t greatly improved they will determine what went wrong. The difference between the pre-test data and the post-test data is teaching and learning and is a key piece of what happens with collaborative time.

Collaboration time provides this foundation so that when parents go to parent/teacher conferences they will be able to see their child’s before and after assessment data in language arts, science, math and social studies, something they’ve never seen before. They can see what their child’s actually learned, said Bouge.