STUDENT POPULATION BY ETHNIC GROUPS

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Lisa Bryant
6 years ago
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Pendleton School District enrolls 3,297 students in grades K-12 in one comprehensive high school, one middle school, and five elementary schools.

1 Application Narrative Section B 1. What is your school district s philosophy about the urgent need to retain the number of educators who are culturally and/or linguistically diverse in Oregon s PK-12 classrooms? Pendleton School District enrolls 3,297 students in grades K-12 in one comprehensive high school, one middle school, and five elementary schools. We also have an alternative school, education programming at a residential treatment facility, and a charter school on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. The chart below illustrates our diverse student body: STUDENT POPULATION BY ETHNIC GROUPS 2% 2% 0% 10% Asian Black/African American 16% 70% White American Indian/Alaskan Native Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander While our overall performance on state assessments is generally above the state average, sub-groups are performing lower than expected. Our student population is diverse, but our staff remains largely representative of majority culture. Of the 156 certified staff and 16 administrators, only 4 are identified as culturally or linguistically diverse. We know students learn best in an environment that is inclusive, where they make connections to staff and students. We understand the value of having a culturally and linguistically diverse staff, but, with a limited pool of applicants, we have been unable to increase the diversity of our staff. We are submitting this application not only to help us develop a plan to increasing the diversity of our staff, but to make systemic change. Our overall goal is to create a culture 2

2 that supports and celebrates diversity, where our students, staff and community members all feel welcome, and where all students are expected to succeed. We believe this grant is an opportunity for us to focus on system change, develop a plan that will guide our future decisions, and help us build connections to community and regional resources that will allow us to increase the diversity of our staff. We have a significant population of Native American students, but no Native American teachers. The Native American population is one that is often overlooked because of their relatively small number compared to other groups. In our district, the Native American population is moist at-risk. We are in a position to influence promising students to pursue a career in education, and are very interested in creating opportunities for our Native American students to earn college credit and explore an educational career while still in high school. Our best opportunity to increase our Native American staff is to grow our own. We have established partnerships with Eastern Oregon University, Blue Mountain Community College, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. We want to expand these partnerships to both support our efforts to increase the diversity of our staff and to provide opportunities to our Native American students. We are ready to walk our talk. 2. Why should your district be awarded the Oregon Minority Educator Retention Grant? What other grants/programs have you used or currently use as a resource to support this work? What do programming and services to retain minority educators currently look like? Pendleton School District faces unique challenges in recruiting diverse staff. We are one of a few districts in the state with a significant population of Native American students. We face the challenge of being in a rural part of the state with limited external resources to 3

3 draw on. We need to develop strategies that are specific to our needs and at this point in our planning, we have ideas and we have identified needs, but we re not sure what specific strategies would be most effective for us. We hope that the grant will provide us with the expertise and resources to explore effective strategies and to develop a plan that will work for us in a small, rural community. The grant would buy us the gift of time and expertise to put our ideas into a feasible plan. We would like to be the district that shows the rest of rural Oregon how to grow our own professional staff. We would like our Native American graduates to come back to our schools as teachers and guide the next generation of students to graduation. We believe we can build those pathways. We have an existing mentorship program for new teachers that is unique to Pendleton. We would allocate some grant resources to updating the existing curriculum to include a focus on cultural diversity. Our administrators and our human resource staff have participated in equity and diversity training and, again, this is an area that we want to expand in staff training as we look for ways to change our school culture. 3. How would your organization leverage/support/reallocate resources (e.g., fiscal, personnel, technology, training, coaching, materials, etc.) to assist in the design and/or implementation phases of your program? You will need to complete the budget worksheet to accompany your application as well. The information provided in this question should mirror the allocations noted on your budget worksheet. The Pendleton School District is committed to changing how we do business. We realize that to make these changes we must rely on existing resources. We anticipate that the plan we develop will reallocate resources to support restructuring our system. The district will allocate staff time to carrying out the planning activities. Our superintendent will serve as project director. His direct and active participation in this project sends a 4

4 strong message that developing a culture that supports and encourages equity is a priority for our district. The planning grant is a relatively small amount of money. We will use grant funds to pay for specific planning activities, staff training that will increase our knowledge of effective strategies for building an inclusive school culture, and travel costs to explore promising strategies that might be appropriate for our plan. All other costs associated with building our district plan will be paid from the general fund. 4. What do you anticipate as potential barriers for the collaborative design team in this process? How will the school district address those barriers? Are there any unique characteristics of your school district that need to be considered? Many of the barriers we face are not unique to our district. Other rural districts with decreasing or stagnant population growth face the same challenges that we do. Unlike Lake Oswego or Beaverton at the career fairs, applicants do not stand in line to talk with us about working in our district. This is especially true for teachers in high demand subject areas, or for teachers with in-demand characteristics. There is no existing pool of Native American teachers in our area. We have a low turnover in teaching staff. We usually have only a few openings a year, most of those through retirements. A very stable workforce limits our opportunities to hire new staff. Because our enrollment numbers are not growing and funding levels have not kept pace with increased costs, we have not had the opportunity to add new FTE to our staffing levels. If we are going to increase the diversity of our staffing, we need to make it a priority in hiring the few positions we have open each year. We need to optimize the advantage of any increase in FTE (new positions) to assure that we can match diverse applicants to the 5

5 openings. We need to build a pool of qualified applicants so that when positions open, we have candidates ready to apply. We are not yet ready as a solo district to participate in a pipeline partnership, but would ultimately like to work toward that readiness. There are limited higher education options in our community. Native American students are an underserved minority group. Limited state resources are allocated to the unique needs of individual tribes. In our area Federal Title VII funding goes directly to the tribe, not to the school district. Lastly, there is still an element in our community that does not recognize the need to encourage diversity. While overt racism is rare, there is insensitivity to the challenges that people of color or culturally different people face in a white dominant community. There has been an attitude that diversity is not an issue that majority culture should have to deal with; that somehow we are robbing from mainstream students by addressing the needs of a special population. Old attitudes die hard and transformation will be a challenge for a few. 5. Please provide a brief outline of an action plan for your project that includes goals, related outcomes, activities, and indicators of success/needed improvement. We are applying for a planning grant. We are therefore focusing our goals and objectives around the steps we need to take to develop an effective action plan for achieving our goal of increasing staff diversity. Goal: 1. Increase and maintain the diversity of our professional staff. Outcome: 1.1 Develop a district plan to address the lack of diversity in our professional staff. Activity: Establish a collaborative leadership team made up of human resource managers, community organizations, administrators, collective bargaining 6

6 representatives, teachers, board members, recently hired minority staff, and at least one minority student representative. Roster of membership on file. Membership reflects grant-required members and includes tribal members. Activity Leadership team reviews literature on the need for diversity. Agenda on file Activity: Leadership team reviews district data Data review materials on file. Data points that indicate areas that need to be addressed in the plan are outlined. Activity: Leadership team and key district staff from each building participate in diversity training. Training roster on file. Participants from each building identify areas of concern and brainstorms possible solutions. Activity: Leadership team members and key district staff make site visits to districts and/or universities with promising programs for increasing staff diversity. Participants report back to leadership team. Activity: Leadership team brainstorms strategies for increasing staff diversity Strategies on file Activity: Leadership team outlines an action plan Draft Action Plan on file Activity: Share Action Plan with key communicators (school and community) Feedback on file Activity: Review feedback and make revisions to plan if necessary Submit recruitment and retention plan to ODE by June, 2014 One of the challenges of writing goals and objectives for planning is that it is impossible to determine ahead of time what strategies or approaches the team will decide to utilize. At this time, those of us who are working to put this process in place have ideas of 7

7 what we would like to see, but currently our team lacks the diversity that will allow us to broaden our perspectives. We are looking to the grant for resources that will provide time and expertise to develop an effective plan. Some components that we expect our plan to include are: Cultural awareness/sensitivity training for staff Review of hiring practices and procedures Strengthening our relationship and building momentum with the Confederated Tribes Positioning ourselves to partner with our local community college (BMCC) and Eastern Oregon University to establish a pathway to teacher certification for promising minority candidates. Exploring a teaching cadet program to encourage minority students to enter the teaching profession Refining our existing mentoring program and including support for new minority teachers. 6. Briefly describe your plan for continuing the minority educator retention funding through this grant beyond the grant period. How do you anticipate sustainability of the retention model for at least two years beyond this grant? Our plan is to utilize the grant resources to develop a clear vision and action plan to create a supportive and diverse learning environment. By evaluating our existing structures and resources and constructing a clear action plan we will build our capacity to carry out identified project activities after the funding period has ended. Our intention is to fully integrate diversity strategies into our regular activities. Our hope is that fostering diversity will become seamless; it will just be how we do business. 8

8 We will submit our action plan to the state to apply for the additional implementation funding. We anticipate that by the end of the implementation-funding period we will have had the opportunity to fully train our staff and to develop systems to support diversity. We will have developed new partnerships with local business and organizations. Over the course of the funding period we will integrate project activities into our program that is funded with general fund dollars. We recognize the reality of public funding. There are no guarantees of future increases to funding. With this in mind, we will actively seek additional resources to support this effort. 9

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