Weekly delay lets teachers consult

For teachers in the Coeur d’Alene School District, one hour on Monday mornings will now be used to collaborate with co-workers. Lesson plans will be reviewed, tests created, strategies chewed over – the schools’ communal brain joining forces for the benefit of students.

An hour also grants teenagers more time to sleep in, while some parents will get extra time with their children. For some parents of elementary-age children, those 60 minutes might place a strain on their work schedules.

On the first day of the school week, classes in Coeur d’Alene schools begin an hour later this year, as the district shifts to the collaboration schedule. The measure, adopted by trustees at a June board meeting, allots an hour of professional development time within the contracted work hours of educators.

It applies to all 17 schools in the district, with the 60 minutes of instructional time added in 15-minute increments to the end of the school day Tuesday through Friday.

“The concept behind it is to give teachers an opportunity to come together for an extended period of time and really look at instruction, curriculum and assessments, and work together collaboratively so that there is a sense of unity and cohesiveness around those areas,” said Superintendent Hazel Bauman, adding that the issue had been in the works for nearly a decade. “It all around raises the level of the school and what it’s doing for the kids – the tide rises and all the ships rise on it.”

Nationally, more than 70 percent of teachers participate in similar schedules, according to a fact sheet on the district’s website, while Spokane and Sandpoint school districts have had job-embedded collaboration time for years. Three area schools – Lakes Magnet Middle School, Sorenson Elementary and Hayden Meadows Elementary – instituted pilot programs in recent years.

“All three of those schools report a lot of success and a lot of positive feedback,” Bauman said, “and the parents have agreed that, yes, it is inconvenient, but it’s worth the inconvenience because of the improved atmosphere they’ve seen in the school.”

Not a break for teachers

In addressing concern from some people in the community about the new schedule, Bauman explained it’s an hour dedicated to professional productivity – not a time to relax in the teacher’s lounge. The goal is to improve in three primary areas of education: Curriculum, instruction and assessment.

“We’re not going into this haphazardly,” she said, adding that each meeting features agendas and quarterly teacher surveys to see what’s working and what’s not. “If it’s not as successful as we want it to be, we’re going to tweak it … We’re doing this very intentionally and very carefully and with a lot of professionalism and I think that should reassure parents that it is going to be time well spent.”

The new schedule wasn’t without controversy. After introducing the measure in April, the board decided to delay acting on it to allow more input from faculty and the community. The district posted information on its website that addressed some frequently asked questions.

“We slowed it down for a month and said we did want input. We surveyed all the teachers and we also sent a letter out to all the parents that said to let us know if there is anything we haven’t thought about,” Bauman said. “I think we really responded to the criticism in good faith and tried hard to mitigate that issue.”

Sid Fredrickson, the only board member to vote against the measure, said at the June board meeting in which it was approved that he’d never before fielded so many concerns from the community in his eight years as a trustee.

“There are also those parents that can’t readily make (child care) arrangements, but I hope it works. I hope I’m wrong,” Fredrickson said in a phone interview in August.

Child-care program expanded

The district sought to mitigate problems for parents of elementary-age children by expanding its child care program, School Plus, which offers before- and after-school options. Transportation schedules were also adjusted. Families previously participating in child care pay no additional fee, while nonparticipating families can opt for child care on Monday mornings for $8 monthly, or $4 for two weeks a month. Special arrangements are made for those who cannot afford those options.

“I think the saving grace here is School Plus … not very many districts have this,” Bauman said about the fee-based program. “The promise that we have made is that if a parent can’t afford child care for that additional hour, we will pick that up and we will pay for it. We believe that already parents have got child care challenges and that by saying we will pay for this hour – if it causes any sort of consternation – we have brought it back down to a sort of homeostasis of where it was before.”

Of the roughly 560 students registered in August for the School Plus child care programs, including before and after school, 75 were enrolled for the late-start care, with only seven parents citing it as a burden and having the fee waived, said Patty Breuchaud, School Plus director. On the second Monday of the school year, 378 children attended the range of child care programs offered in the 11 elementary schools in the district; 95 of the students were there because of the new schedule.

Those numbers, Breuchaud added, are sure to change as the school year progresses.

“We’ve tried to just cover our costs – just the staff and that’s all – to make it as easy on the parents as possible,” she said. “But by and large, parents have said ‘Wow, I can afford that.’ We don’t want this to be an obstacle for anybody … We value the partnership we have with the parents in this community.”

Why Monday?

The No. 1 issue cited by parents about the late start is the day it falls on.

Colleen Krajack, a parent of two Sorenson students, believes collaboration is imperative to each school’s success. Monday mornings, however, are challenging for her to work around, she added.

“I am 100 percent in support of it. I think it’s absolutely vital for teachers so that they can weave the arts and humanities web through the entire curriculum,” she said, referring to the magnet school’s focus. “I do not feel personally that Monday morning is a good time to do it, though.”

Monday was chosen for several reasons, Superintendent Bauman said. Teachers selected it over Wednesday morning in a survey, and it provides a better start to the week for staff while giving students one more hour to get up and ready after the weekend. It also avoids a midweek disruption for students with disabilities, according to the district.

Krajack said, “I think they did the best they could for the circumstance they had, which is they are not going to be able to please everybody. But I hope they will reconsider Monday morning.”

Throughout last school year, Krajack said she witnessed Sorenson teachers craft a learning environment that emphasized the magnet school’s arts and humanities spotlight more than ever. It was evident across all grade levels, she said, in her children’s schoolwork and activities.

“I really felt that prior to collaboration they were not as successful in doing that,” she said. “Now, they’ve weaved it through the entire concept and the entire curriculum. If you look at Sorenson scores, they have gone up dramatically over the last year … Our children have benefited from the teachers’ ability to make sense of all different kinds of topics and make it interesting and fun for our kids.”

The benefits of collaboration

Matthew Handelman, the district’s new associate superintendent, formerly worked in the Spokane school district. As principal at Moran Prairie Elementary, he saw firsthand the effects of collaboration.

“It provides, I think, what most professions have time for, which is time to study best practices, work with colleagues, make better decisions about daily practices and daily and long-term planning,” he said. “It also creates cohesiveness among the staff and helps in terms of communication.”

For example, a rookie second-grade teacher can learn things from a veteran third-grade educator, or high school teachers can create a test over a unit on Shakespeare in a fraction of the time it would have taken alone. “To me, and beyond just staff meetings, to have common professional development creates common understanding, vision – that time is just invaluable,” Handelman said. “I would say at this point in Spokane, people couldn’t imagine life without it.”

Bauman added that she believes the same will happen in the Coeur d’Alene School District. Schools will try out the new collaboration schedule for the rest of the school year to evaluate it, she said.