| St. Francis district takes different approach to Q Comp |
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| Wednesday, 18 March 2009 | ||
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Staff writer Although statewide news reports indicate that school districts participating in Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s Quality Compensation (Q Comp) program are having problems maintaining the funding, it does not hold true in St. Francis Independent School District 15.
District 15 was the third school district to sign up for the 2005 program, which wanted to tie teachers’ pay to student achievement by giving merit bonuses. Instead of using the $260 per pupil unit - $172 per pupil unit from state aid and $88 per pupil unit from the local annual levy - it gets for Q Comp for bonuses, District 15 used the money to redesign its pay schedule. Before Q Comp, a starting teacher in the district earned about $30,000. Now they can earn $39,270, said Keillor. The goal behind increasing the starting wage by 20 percent “was to hire who we wanted to hire,” he said. The re-configuration also shortens the time it takes teachers to reach their top pay rate from 26 years to 17 years. “It is probably still too long,” said Keillor. Essentially teachers would come to the district at the age of 22 and not reach their top salary of $72,000 until they were 48, he said. Although the district’s top pay is still $4,000 less than the neighboring Anoka-Hennepin School District, adjusting the starting salary and the number of years it takes to reach the top pay scale put the district in the position to hire and retain the highest qualified teachers, Keillor said. The idea of merit bonuses is just a bad idea, he said. The funding is flat and school districts cannot pay for the way the program is designed, Keillor said. It also hurts teachers in other ways to give bonuses because they cannot be figured in when teachers go to buy a house or get a car loan, he said. If the district only gave bonuses based on merit, there would have been less commitment from the everyone, Keillor said. Approximately 80 percent of the district’s 400 teachers have become part the Q Comp program. By the fall of 2010 the district hopes to have all the teachers in the program, said Keillor. Q Comp will also help the district attract new teachers to replace the huge bulge of baby boomers that started retiring in 2006, he said. The majority of the district’s teachers were hired in the 1970s and 1980s when the area’s population boomed. The number of teachers tripled during that time, said Keillor. The loss of 33 teachers next year, the result of budget cuts, has put a hiccup in the district Q Comp schedule. It is a pretty significant cut of Q Comp teachers, said Keillor. Improving skills Q Comp is also helping teachers improve their teaching skills and providing a support system. “New teachers are not left with a pile of books, a pat on the back and a ‘see you in June’ mentality,” said Keillor. The district used some of the $1.2 million it is getting for Q Comp to strengthen the teacher mentoring program it started in 2001. It also started doing the four evaluations per year per teacher. Although state law requires probationary teachers receive three evaluations, it was not a regular practice in District 15 or in other school districts, said Keillor. When he pulled his own 34-year file, Keillor found he only had two evaluations in it. “Some teachers have more and some have less,” he said. According to Keillor, teachers coming in from other districts did not have any evaluations in their files. He had more evaluations at his summer job changing tires, he said. “I had more help learning how to change and balance tires than I got for teaching when I first started,” Keillor said. Since starting Q Comp in 2005, the district’s 400 teachers have had 1,200 observations, some of which are done by fellow teachers. New teachers in the district also meet with an experienced mentor-teacher who is part of their personal four-person team. The team meets twice a year and it sets goals at the first meeting and determines when the observations will take place. Q Comp has also been used to bring professional development programs into the school instead of the teachers having to go out of the district. The teachers work together along with a fellow teacher that has been trained as a specialist, said Keillor. The focus is on improving student performance, he said. The specialist teaches techniques in everything from helping English language learners to teaching math and effective writing instruction. The district has built on to its teacher academy with Q Comp, he said. Every year teachers have the opportunity to take continuing education in professional areas that need work or they want to learn more about, Keillor said. Bonuses Although the teachers do not receive bonuses for merit, the schools do. Each school building has an academic goal, such as a certain percentage of students will pass a standardized assessment test, said Keillor. If the school makes the goal, which is set at the beginning of the academic year and filed with the Minnesota Department of Education, it will receive a bonus based on its enrollment. Although the district has had the school bonus for the last three years, not every school receives one every year. When a school does not earn its bonus, the money is rolled back into an interest bearing account set up for the bonus program, said Keillor. The schools have used the bonuses to buy whiteboards, smart board technology, curriculum transparencies, projectors, document cameras and professional development workshops. The site management committees, which include parents, teachers and administrators, decide how the funds are spent. The schools could have used the funds toward teachers’ salaries but opted to put them toward improving student education, said Keillor. They wanted to give the school community a goal to work toward, he said. 2008-2009 site goals During the current school year, each District 15 school has been working toward improving student achieve in a specific area. The schools focus on where the student testing is the weakest on the standardized assessment test, either the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA-II) or the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). If Cedar Creek Community (CCCS) students increase their reading testing results by 3 percent, the school could earn a $18,253 bonus. The funds come from Alternative Teacher Professional Pay System (ATPPS) To earn the bonus, 52 percent of the kindergartners will have to achieve the low risk level on letter naming fluency section of the DIBELS assessment. Forty-five percent of the first-graders will have to achieve the “established” level on the spring benchmarks on the nonsense word fluency section. In second- through fifth-grades, 67.8 percent of the students will need to meet or exceed the target growth in reading. In 2006-2007 the school received $14,382 in bonuses for its second-, fourth- and fifth-grade goals. This year East Bethel Community School could receive $11,269 if it meets its reading achievement goals. In addition to the 3 percent increase on the standardized test results, 73 percent of the kindergartners will need to improve their fall DIBELS letter naming fluency by at least one risk level or maintain their low risk level. Eighty percent of the school’s first-graders also have to improve their fall DIBELS test results in nonsense word fluency. Sixty-seven percent of both second- and third-graders have to meet or exceed the reading target. The amount is higher in fourth- and fifth-grades. Eighty-one percent of fourth-graders and 74 percent of fifth-graders will have to meet or exceed the reading target. For the 2006-2007 school, EBCS earned $10,676 by meeting all of its goals. The same year St. Francis Elementary School (SFE) received $10,646 when it met three of four goals. This year it is eligible for $13,143 but 60 percent of the school’s third- through fifth-graders will need to meet or exceed their targeted growth in reading. St. Francis Middle School is aiming for $22,740. To earn it, the sixth-grade students’ scores on the MCA-II will need to improve from 81 percent to 84 percent in reading. The seventh-grade improvement will have to increase from 72.75 percent to 75.75 percent in reading. The eighth-graders will have to pass their standardized science test. Because it failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on the science test last year, the middle school’s eighth-graders have to bring the results up from 38 percent to 41 percent for the school to make its goal. Last year, the middle school only met one of three goals and it received an achievement bonus of $7,644. At St. Francis High School, it will be the 10th- and 11th-graders that will need to make their goals to get the school its $30,754 bonus. The 11th-graders will have to improve their achievement on MCA-II graduation math test so that a minimum of 49 percent of students will meet or exceed expectations. The reading results for the 10th-grade students will need to improve so a minimum of 75 percent of students will meet of exceed the MCA-II expectations. During the 2006-2007 school year, the high school only met half of its goal and received $16,074. Improvement While a January study of the Q Comp program done by Hezel Associates indicated there was not enough data to assess the program, it did draw one conclusion. According its report, “There is a significant and positive relationship between the number of years a school has been implementing Q Comp and student achievement and the number of years a school is in Q comp with student academic achievement. This means as a school has more years of experience with Q Comp implementation, student achievement tends to increase. This relationship is slightly less pronounced at the lower elementary level.” It also found if Q Comp is implemented in the school and four conditions are present, student achievement can increase. Those conditions are: • School administrators feel their teachers consider Q Comp to be successful in their school. • When teachers feel that someone other than the principal is responsible for conducting Q Comp evaluations/observations. • When standard-based lessons are not the main topic of professional development activities and discussions, but other topics are addressed. • When teachers feel that the addition of multiple career paths in their school will encourage them to remain in the teaching profession longer. The study looked at the conditions at St. Francis High School and EBCS and found strong support for the program at the sites and the right conditions for success. “And the longer the district has Q Comp program, the clearer student improvement will be,” Keillor said. Tammy Sakry is at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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