When Shalonda Gregory joined MetWest High School as principal in 2020, she had moved across the country from Kentucky, in the middle of a pandemic, to lead a school with high staff turnover that had lost two principals in recent years. Her task was to come in, stabilize the school and get it back on track. 

In her second year, the 2021-2022 school year, only 29% of teachers returned. But Gregory said she was here to stay. And the latest round of state test scores shows that student achievement at MetWest is rebounding.

As a “Big Picture School,” MetWest follows a nontraditional model, where students spend three days a week doing core learning and instruction, and spend Tuesdays and Thursdays participating in internships and career learning with a mentor. Their internships are in fields ranging from automotive to education, healthcare, and videography. 

“At Big Picture Schools, we believe not all the learning happens inside the schools but outside as well,” Gregory told The Oaklandside. “I will even double down and say the experiences I believe my students have outside of school with their mentors and internships in a lot of cases are more authentic and a lot richer than the experiences that happen inside the school.” 

In her years at the school, Gregory has balanced her commitment to that program with an emphasis on improving school culture and strengthening instruction. 

It seems to be working. 

In the latest release of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium results, the standardized math and reading tests known as SBAC that California uses to assess school performance, MetWest students made substantial gains — showing the most growth among Oakland Unified middle and high schools year over year. MetWest students gained 42 points in reading and 42 points in math, around twice the growth of the next highest secondary school. 

The district’s goal, according to an October presentation by interim superintendent Denise Saddler, was for every school in Oakland Unified School District to gain 15 points in reading and 20 points in math. Eight OUSD schools hit the reading goal and nine schools met the math goal. 

MetWest was one of those bright spots. During an initial assessment in the fall, 15% of students were at or above grade level in reading. At the midyear assessment, typically conducted in November or December, that number doubled to 30%. The proportion of students at MetWest who tested three or more grade levels below proficiency declined from 55% of students at the beginning of the year to 36% in the middle of the school year. 

While there’s still significant room for growth, the gains at MetWest show that what Gregory and her staff have implemented seem to be effective. 

“The kids need a lot of support,” Gregory told The Oaklandside. “A lot of these kids are coming into high school grade levels behind where they should be. There’s a lot of intervention that needs to take place that probably should’ve taken place in middle school and it takes funding for that.”

Intervention classes and a literacy coach

One of the first things Gregory did was restructure the school schedule to add intervention classes for students based on the district’s diagnostic tool, i-Ready. Students are tested throughout the year using the software, which identifies student knowledge gaps and helps educators develop personalized improvement plans that they can use during their intervention classes, Gregory said. 

Students are all encouraged to attend homework club after school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, where students work with tutors to get help with their assignments. Gregory asks teachers to support students in identifying where they are in their learning and to celebrate them when they make progress.

“We’re building capacity for students to take ownership of their learning and have more self-awareness and be more in the driver’s seat of pushing themselves along,” she said. “When a student can say, ‘I can do algebraic expressions really well but I’m really struggling with something else in math,’ when they can acknowledge that and say the steps they’re taking, that’s when I know we’ve arrived.”

MetWest has also been building teacher capacity. Key to that was hiring a literacy coach, Beatriz Ferrer-Castro, who joined MetWest in the last school year. She coaches teachers, plans professional development, and oversees the i-Ready assessments. 

“We’re trying to break away from the idea that literacy is only the responsibility of the English teachers or social science teachers,” Ferrer-Castro told The Oaklandside. “It’s everybody’s responsibility. Literacy happens in every classroom and we try to go with the idea of every teacher is a language teacher.”

Ferrer-Castro coordinates professional learning communities, where teachers across disciplines come together to evaluate student work with a common rubric. This helps teachers identify gaps in student learning across subject areas and come up with a plan to address them. 

Ferrer-Castro takes what she calls learning walks, where she and other observers visit classrooms and take notes on what teachers can improve. This year, one of her suggestions for teachers was to create more time for structured student conversations, where students have the opportunity to talk with their peers about the content they’re learning.

“It has to be structured, giving them guidelines so they can have academic conversations and process language,” Ferrer-Castro said. “The hypothesis is that if you’re offering students the opportunity, they’re going to come out with better writing.”

But with the district facing deep budget cuts for next year, including to school sites, educators at MetWest worry that these efforts could stall. Ferrer-Castro is particularly concerned about what the district’s impending budget cuts could mean for positions like hers.

On top of all of her professional development and coaching efforts, Ferrer-Castro also teaches a language development class to English learners. 

“I do 10,000 other things,” she said. “I don’t know who’s going to do these things if I’m not here next year. All of the things that we have, is the bare minimum.”
According to a plan adopted by the school board in December, every OUSD school could see reductions of 7 to 10% to their site budgets. That could mean a hit to key budget lines such as stipends for staff who oversee afterschool programming or study halls. The cuts could also mean fewer administrators and staff around to build relationships with students — relationships educators say are key to keeping students in school and learning.

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