Balancing act

Context is key.

That is what Vestavia Hills City Schools Superintendent Sheila Phillips got out of a series of meetings with parents over the past couple of months with regard to middle schools, student experiences and the word “alignment.”

“We were saying the same thing — but not saying the same thing,” Phillips said.

In early September, the Board of Education announced a series of public meetings about how the former Berry Middle School property and other school properties would be used once Berry had been purchased.

At the first of those meetings, Phillips said, she realized she and parents were on different pages.

And the topic of “alignment” — particularly between Vestavia’s two middle schools, Louis Pizitz and Liberty Park — was brought up across the board.

Seeing the forest through the trees

In an attempt to better hear concerns from parents, Phillips said she and her staff realized they needed to have separate, designated meetings about middle school alignment and set those in late September.

At the first meeting, Phillips outlined the various ways the school system had been working toward what it defined as “alignment,” which was a broad-brush tactic of aligning the entire district at a foundational level, and moving out from there.

“For us as a school district, and the way we go about our work, the context of where we started — actually in October 2013 — is a big deal to us,” she said.

At that time, she said, the majority of the system was operating as eight or nine different entities, with each school keeping mostly to itself. This wasn’t a problem, Phillips said, because schools were strong.

“Because of the level of education of our families, because of the expectations of our community and of the school system over many, many years, you could do that,” she said.

However, as the district began gearing up for the accreditation process and she and others began to look more closely at things such as standards and continuing education for teachers, she said the district realized there was no overall “framework” for how to do things — and that aligning the school system was something to work toward.

“If you don’t approach your work on that continuum, then it can become fragmented,” she said. “That’s what we were finding was happening.”

When AdvancedEd, a nonprofit, non-government accrediting agency, assessed the school sytem in 2014, Phillips said they were taking a different approach — one that would help in the school system’s alignment efforts.

Phillips said when AdvancedEd came in, it affirmed the system’s strengths, but it also recognized the problems Phillips and her team had noticed and gave them a starting point. When state compliance monitoring began shortly after, she said, they started building from there.

“It was quite an adjustment,” she said, citing changes in things such as what elementary teachers call lab equipment, making sure to use the same terminology as high school teachers.

When Phillips presented what the system had been doing to pursue alignment, reactions in the first meeting were, as Phillips and others put it, heated.

She said it quickly became clear the biggest concern parents had was course selection.

“Those are two separate things,” she said. “But they do go together.”

She said because she and her staff had been looking at alignment in a bigger, broader context, they didn’t realize that for parents, the main concern was the availability of certain classes at Pizitz Middle that weren’t available at Liberty Park.

“It was very evident that what we were calling alignment didn’t align with what the parents were calling alignment, even though we were working toward what I would suggest is the same goal,” she said.

Differences

Concerns about differences in course offerings between Pizitz and Liberty Park primarily revolved around the availability of honors and advanced classes as well as foreign language options — and how the availability of those options and the way courses are structured affects a student’s experience.

For example, at Pizitz, students have the option to take gifted and advanced English in seventh and eighth grades, respectively, whereas Liberty Park only has gifted English in sixth. At Pizitz, students have the choice between Spanish, French and German for their foreign language, whereas Liberty Park only offers Spanish.

Other parents were concerned with elective options at each school. While students at both schools can only take one elective, Pizitz has digital photography, coding and robotics, and girls’ choir classes that Liberty Park does not.

There are other significant differences between the schools as well. 

Pizitz Middle has been around since the 1960s; Liberty Park was built less than 10 years ago. 

Pizitz has more than 1,100 students; Liberty Park has roughly 500. 

Liberty Park is geographically removed from the center of the city; Pizitz is in the heart of town. 

Liberty Park uses a five-block schedule rather than Pizitz’s eight-period format.

In aligning the two schools academically, some parents at the meeting expressed their concern as to what else that would change in order for the experiences to be equitable.

Similar, but not the same

For eighth-grade parent and Liberty Park resident Anne Siple, wholesale alignment brings up more questions than it answers.

“Really, my biggest concern is that in focusing so much on some specifics, we are losing sight of other things, maybe other benefits,” Siple said

She said she has been aware of the schools’ differences since she was on the PTO board when Liberty Park was created in 2008.

Siple has three sons, and with the oldest in college, the middle a senior at Vestavia Hills High School and the youngest in eighth grade at Liberty Park, she has had a child at the middle school every year since the beginning, apart from one.

“I’ve always known about the differences,” she said, but explained she didn’t realize the details of those differences until the alignment conversation got started in-depth this summer. 

She added that she thinks there are misconceptions among parents as to the degree of differences and equitability between the two middle schools. For example, Siple said she thinks some of those concerns are unfounded, such as students being unable to test for the Seal of Biliteracy without starting a language in middle school — which she said she knows to be untrue because her senior is doing just that.

But more than that, Siple is worried the solution may not be as simple as simply adding classes to Liberty Park.

“What I would like for them to do as they’re looking at any changes they need to make in order to get alignment — I’m not saying they shouldn’t have some sort of alignment plan — but I think they need to look at best practices, rather than saying, ‘Everybody needs to do what Pizitz does now,’” Siple said.

She gave the example of a subject that already has been aligned — the math placement tests. 

Before, she said, Liberty Park students didn’t have the option to be in a lower-level class. There were only regular and advanced classes. For her and her children, she said, the way that Liberty Park had done things on its own was preferable.

Phillips said the goal of creating a standard math-placement test was to create vertical alignment: making sure students at both middle schools are getting the same academic support as they prepare for high school, no matter their current academic level.

Siple said she agrees that having the same teaching methodologies is a good idea; her concern is that forcing the two schools into the same framework might not be the best plan.

“I don’t think that the experiences are similar, and I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing,” she said. She gave the example of Liberty Park’s smaller size allowing the teachers to know most if not all of the students by name.

Siple said a major area in which she does not want to see a change is the way math and English are taught at Liberty Park, where students essentially get “double math, double English,” because of the block schedule.

“I think we do really well on our test scores because we have the double math, because we have the double English,” she said.

However, Siple said, she doesn’t advocate making test scores the most important benchmark. She is pointing out that teachers have the time to teach students well without adding extra stress. 

In the 2014 and 2015 testing periods, test scores for both schools were well above state and national averages, with most of the schools’ scores being within a few percentage points. In 2015, however, Liberty Park eighth-grade students tested a full 10 percentage points higher in math over Pizitz students. For seventh-grade English, where Liberty Park has no advanced option, the opposite was true, with Pizitz students scoring 12 percentage points higher.

Experiences and Personality

Phillips addressed the concern that alignment would mean an attempt at making the schools identical.

“You want similarities, so you’re not acting as different entities, but you also respect what has been established within each of those naturally,” she said.

Like families and communities, Phillips said, each school has its own personality that can’t be replicated at another school.

“It’s not about trying to make one school look like the other,” she said. “Because when you have one school with 500 children and you have another school with 1,100, there are going to be differences in the way that you’re going to be able to approach it.”

And that’s where the next steps begin, Phillips said.

Next Steps

Throughout the month of November, Phillips said teachers from both schools will meet to dissect what happened at the public meetings, what is best for students and what is the best way to move forward.

“Collectively, how do we make sure that the alignment for both schools, both student bodies — how does that look?” Phillips said. “And we let the teachers brainstorm. We’ll talk about not only courses, but we’ll talk about scheduling, talk about what they’ve already done.”

From there, she said, they would move forward with what works best for both schools, adding and changing courses as it makes sense, because that is what the parents have requested. Then, she said, sixth-grade teachers will meet with fifth-grade teachers, and eighth-grade teachers will meet with ninth-grade teachers, as the alignment discussion moves vertically.

That work won’t be easy, but it will have to progress steadily in order for the course offerings to be ready in time for students to sign up in early spring, Phillips said.

Though her son won’t be affected by the changes as he advances to high school, Siple said she will continue to watch, as the alignment discussion indirectly affects the entire school system. 

She said she hopes Phillips and the Board of Education will focus on best practices that will benefit both schools and protect the good things that each has to offer.

“I think there’s a lot of good work that could be done if it’s looked at the right way,” she said.

And Phillips encouraged parents to continue the dialogue as the process moves forward.

“We’re peeling back the layers and determining how to take a great thing and make it even better,” she said. “It’s hard work; the conversations can be tough at times; it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of thought, but I think we are the model community for how you don’t do education alone; you do it as a community; you do it together; you push the envelope with one another.”

Editor's Note: The November 2016 print edition of this story incorrectly spelled Anne Siple's name as Anne Sipel. We regret the error and have corrected it in the online version.