Pacific Cascade tries new homework approach

December 8, 2009

By Chantelle Lusebrink

Just like their students, Pacific Cascade Freshman Campus teachers and principals are eagerly awaiting this semester’s grades.

At the beginning of the school year, teachers and the school’s principal, Dana Bailey, launched a new program called Homework On Time, which had school officials calling students’ homes when homework wasn’t turned in.

Essentially, the program holds students accountable for turning in their assignments, but not simply by entering it as a zero in the grade book. Instead, students are made to turn in their work after teachers give their parents a call, whether they get credit from their teacher or not.

Every student that has a missing assignment fills out a pink slip that includes information about the assignment, teacher, due date, date it would come in and reasons for not finishing it. After filling out the form, teachers would follow up with calls home.

“This is school and we do school work here,” Bailey said, of the message she wants to send to students.

The program was an idea developed after several teachers attended a Professional Learning Community conference during summer break.

“We asked ourselves what is one thing that we can do differently to positively impact the lives of this ninth grade class,” Bailey said. “Absences and missed work are really significant factors in poor grades and poor performance in school.”

With research into the previous years’ classes, Bailey and her faculty found that 96 percent of students who were failing by the first quarter of school were still failing at the semester.

“The information we gleaned from that was, early diagnosis is important,” she said.

Since parents of freshman still have a large influence over their children’s lives, by keeping the parents informed of their student’s progress, school officials hoped to keep many of them from falling through the cracks, Bailey said.

“We know sooner if a student is failing in multiple classes and we didn’t need to wait for the quarter to tell us that, when it’s almost too late to make it up,” she said.

When the school made it a goal, Bailey said any concerns with faculty were resolved and those that have arisen have been taken care of.

However, Neva Luke, president of the Issaquah Education Association still said she has received concerns from faculty at the school about the time calling students’ families has taken.

Luke said she had not seen an official written description of the program and hasn’t met with Bailey about it.

“I have heard concerns from staff at PCFC regarding the amount of time that the phone calls can take,” she wrote. “A teacher’s day is already packed with instructional and planning time, meetings, responding to e-mails and voice mails. The additional phone calls that this program requires would have to cut into the other tasks that a teacher must complete each day or result in the staff taking home even more work than they currently do.”

At the quarter, however, Bailey said the results of the program were impressive and that the majority of the school’s 994 students had improved their grade point averages. In fact, 755 of them have 3.0 or higher grade point average.

Preliminary data from the school’s quarter grades determined there were the same amount of students with A’s and students with F’s as there has been in previous years, Bailey said. But the amount of students that float in the low C and D range had improved their grades vastly. Many have high C’s and B’s, she said.

At the quarter, the school’s average grade point average was 3.335. Last year, and in years past, it held steady between 3.0 and 3.1, Bailey said.

Bailey said she would have more complete data when semester grades begin coming in Jan. 22.

The success hasn’t come without a price, though, Bailey acknowledged.

“This is a lot for our teachers and the principals to take on,” she said.

Hours were spent making phone calls, grading the extra papers and reminding students of their obligation to turn in their work. Teachers and principals fit it in wherever possible, she said.

“We really asked ourselves what we could do different,” she said. “Yes, this is crazy. But we’re happy we did it.”

“As educators, we are always looking for ways to help students be successful,” Luke wrote, of what the school’s program can do for student’s education. “There also needs to be a more flexible approach, in the communication between the teacher, student and parents.”

However, Luke said she does believe that students need to be prepared to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their actions to prepare them for life outside the public school system.

“In looking at the system as a whole, from K-12, there needs to be a gradual shift in the responsibility from the teachers and parents to the students,” she wrote.

For the Homework On Time program, Bailey said the next step is to phase out the pink slips and phone calls to a more student self-monitoring system.

Students have been given the skills, now they need to follow through, she said.

“I anticipate we’ll see general movement toward more ninth-graders ready to become successful high school students,” she said. “We knew this wasn’t sustainable throughout the year, but our hope was to catch them early and hopefully the habits they’ve built this year, will continue with them.”

Reach reporter Chantelle Lusebrink at 392-6434, ext. 241, or clusebrink@isspress.com.