Scores tell story of two Maitlands

Only at Maitland.
That is the slogan Julia B. Maitland Elementary School in Morgan City displays on their school spirit shirts and apparel. This concept rings true in many different ways for the school.
It’s only at Maitland that the early education program has a rating of Excellent in the state accountability system.
No other school in the parish earned that rating this year. However, the K-5 score for the school overall is a 57.1 D. The school fell 2.9 points short of earning a C.
So where is the disconnect for these kids between early education and elementary?
First, the scoring systems are very different.
Early education, which is classified as pre-kindergarten, is judged using a rating system called CLASS.
“The state comes and does an observation and I do an observation,” Tonia Verrette, principal of Maitland, said. “So you have an outsider coming in and you have an insider. You are basing the observation on the teacher themselves, not on the scores of the kids.”
This system judges the program by judging the teacher. There are three domains the observer is looking at: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support.
For emotional support, the teachers are judged according to whether the environment is warm and positive and they are building trusting relationships with children.
For classroom organization, the teacher is judged on whether the classroom is organized with a daily routine and minimal disruption.
For instructional support, teachers are judged on whether they help children learn concepts and connect ideas through dialog and play.
“Because you have an outsider and an insider coming in, the scores have to be within one point of each other to be valid. This is from the state, they come in unannounced, they observe, then they take an average of our scores,” Verrette said. “Our teachers are scoring high.”
When you start rating the rest of the school, you are looking at student scores from the LEAP2025 test they take at the end of each year. This score is composed of 75% student performance on the test and 25% student growth.
According to the School Finder website the Louisiana Depart-ment of Education offers at louisianaschools.com, Maitland’s students are showing growth, but still have an overall poor performance on the assessments.
The student progress grade for the school is 79.6, which is a B, but the student performance is a 49.6 which is an F. The overall grade grew from last year’s score by 2.2 points.
“We are improving,” Verrette said, “but I think to judge a teacher by student scores, I think it's ridiculous. Our teachers here teach. They do everything teachers at other schools do and more.
“Teachers need to be judged on how they improve kids, but the kids aren’t the same everywhere, it isn’t one size fits all. Improving a kid doesn’t just mean the number they score on a single test.
“If our scores were based off of our teachers we would have excellent ratings throughout,” Verrette continued. “The state comes in and they are amazed at what they see at this school. They bring teachers from other parishes to look at my teachers. My Eureka person in second grade teaches other teachers about Eureka. It’s not the teachers. Sometimes it is a home factor that is going to affect you or it might be an outside factor in the community and it may be an outside factor for the kid.”
Verrette pointed out that some of her students and teachers have experiences no other schools in the parish have.
“We locked up a person from the state when we had a code red one year,” Verrette said. “Poor lady had to sit in a classroom for three hours because we had a shooting near us, and she had never experienced that before.
“So these kids experience things, and they do it grandly. They are well-behaved, they know the routines, they don’t cut up, but it’s kind of hard and sad to say it is a normalcy for them. Something that certain kids would have no clue what it is really like, for these kids it’s just normal everyday life to know that someone nearby might be shooting. Also, nine out of 10, it is someone related to someone in this school,” Verrette said.
“The thing is, there are so many variables we can’t control. Just recently our school was shut down because of a hostage situation. Where else in this parish has that even occurred? It’s only at Maitland,” Verrette said.
Another issue Maitland has seen, which has affected other schools in the parish, are the changes that keep coming with curriculum. One change is the widely used Eureka Math system designed to align with Common Core.
“My kids did not adjust well with the math program change,” Verrette said. “When my school went down in scores, it was the introduction of Eureka.
“I’m not knocking the program. I think the program is great and I think my kindergarten kids that started in Eureka are going to do great, but my kids that didn’t learn math in the beginning, Eureka style, it was a struggle. And I don’t have parents at home that can understand this math. It isn’t the way they learned it.”
New curriculums are still being introduced and teachers are trying to learn and work their way through them. One of the new Tier I curriculums introduced last year for English language arts is called Guidebooks.
“You could swear Guidebooks is our only subject at this school this year, because it isn’t cut and dry and we are all learning it through professional developments and implementation,” Verrette said. “It’s a lot of planning, a lot of extra work, and to tell a teacher they aren’t doing enough based on a kid’s score, that’s not fair. They are prepping, they are planning, they do everything everyone else does.”
For the most part, teachers teach to enrich the lives of the students who come into their rooms. Teachers strive to provide their students with an environment that supports them emotionally where they can grow towards becoming a successful adult and member of their community. Teachers work at creating a classroom that is organized and works to help the student achieve academic successes. Teachers also do the main thing they are trained to do — provide instructional guidance and support.
These are the elements on which CLASS scores Pre-K, and the elements for which Maitland received a rating of Excellence.
“I think assessments only judge one part,” Verrette said. “They don’t paint an accurate picture of our school or any school, really. It’s just one part. Give us a score on that, fine, but come in and judge these teachers because when people from the outside come in and observe our teachers, they see the same thing they see at other schools. These teachers have 100 percent heart.
“What it comes down to is we need to prepare kids. I’m going to say it to the bitter end. We need to teach kids how to make good choices, how to be good citizens and how to be productive community members because in the end, when you are 18 and graduating, not every kid is going to college and no employer is going to look at you and say, ‘What did you do on your 8th-grade LEAP test?’ But they are going to want to know if you can work for them and do the job.”
“It’s not about the kids’ score; it’s about what are you doing to grow this kid. It has to be mentally, it has to be emotionally, it has to be environmentally because that affects kids, and academically. So yes, you need to look at my scores, assessment-wise, but you also need to look at everything else that is going on too,” Verrette concluded. “I think that is what education should be. We need to sometimes go back to what we started with, it worked at one point, it wasn’t all about numbers, because too many people are focusing just on those numbers. They are forgetting the kid.”