SPILYAYTYMOO
warm springs, Oregon
September 7, 2000 5
Warm Springs Elementary School featured in Summer edition of education magazine
Teaching from the Heart
On the Warm Springs Reservation,
teachers offer students stability, new
pathways to learning, and a
connection to their tribal heritage.
the kids and the community, and I knew what the school could
be."
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Warm Springs teacher Cary Varela has found a community on the
"rez."
Story and photos by JUDY BLANKENSHIP
WARM SPRINGS, Oregon The Warm Springs
Elementary School, with its long, low, central building and
satellite single-wides and modulars, sits like a homely cousin
amid the stately, two-story brick structures left over from
Bureau of Indian Affairs days, when a boarding school occupied
the site. Logging trucks rumble by on the highway just above
the playground, carrying timber from Central Oregon to
Portland, 100 miles away. The sprinkling of houses and tribal
government buildings that constitute the town of Warm Springs
radiate out from the school and up the surrounding hills. With
380 students in kindergarten to fourth grade, the school sits at
the heart of the "rez," as everyone here calls the reservation.
Ninety-eight percent of the children are Native American,
descended from one of three tribes the Wasco, Paiute, and
Warm Springs people settled on the 644,000-acre
reservation by a 19th-century government treaty.
I'. ' '
i V')
The Way
It Was
That Warm Springs Elementary would be a semif inalist in last
year's U.S. Department of Education's National Awards
Program for Model Professional Development seemed an
impossible dream when Dawn Smith came on board as principal
six years ago. A chronically high exodus of staff that had
persisted for 25 years had left the school in a shambles.
"Teachers and principals would come here for the experience,"
says Smith, "but what they got instead was a big culture shock."
Some didn't even stay the year. Student attendance was spotty,
achievement scores were at rock bottom, and professional
development was unknown.
The remarkable turnaround of Warm Springs Elementary can be
attributed to many factors, but everyone interviewed at the
school earlier this year agrees that the transformation is
largely due to the leadership of Dawn Smith. A Klamath Indian,
Smith was recruited by the Warm Springs tribe 26 years ago
while an education senior at the University of Northern
Colorado. She was invited to do a year's internship with the
Jefferson County School District, with the promise of a job if
there were openings.
The following year Smith was hired as a first-grade teacher at
Warm Springs, where she was one of two native teachers. She
stayed 13 years in the first-grade classroom, during which time
she married a Warm Springs man and had two children. In 1992,
after a stint as a counselor. Smith served as vice principal for a
year while traveling "over to the valley" to get her principal's
credentials. True to the established pattern, the presiding
principal left the school at the end of that year, and Smith
found herself at the helm of Warm Springs.
"Things were very chaotic here," remembers Smith, a 46-year-old
woman with short, dark hair and a serious demeanor. "Many
kids were disrespectful and did pretty much whatever they
wanted. Instruction time was practically nil because behavior
management was such a problem. I think that's why I got hired."
Smith adds. "I had a mission, I wasn't going anywhere, I knew
Beginning the Turnaround:
"No Less than Five Years ff
When Smith describes the thorny process she and her staff
undertook to create a unified curriculum, it sounds a lot like a
bunch of people trying to put together one of those giant
landscape puzzles. The tiny pieces were laid out on the table,
and the eager players gathered around. They had a vision of
what the final product should look like, but the challenge was
fitting the pieces together to make a coherent big picture.
Smith cut whole-staff meetings to once a month and organized
grade-level teams to meet the other three weeks. Each team
was charged with developing language arts and math curricula.
Then the entire staff came together to make sure each grade
level curriculum was thorough, systemic, and met district and
state goals.
"Dawn has a gift for identifying talent in her teachers and
matching that talent to the job that needs to be done," says
Johnson. "She found the people on her staff who are natural
curriculum writers and who could get down to the core of what
needs to be taught at what grade level, and in what order. This
school does more in curriculum development than any school I
know in terms of teachers knowing what they're supposed to be
teaching and how to teach it."
Putting the puzzle together:
Curriculum reform and
professional development
In the summer of 1993 Smith launched into the most serious
problem facing the school: recruitment and retention of staff.
She let candidates applying for teaching jobs know that if they
wanted to work at Warm Springs, they needed to make a
commitment of five years. That eliminated a lot of applicants,
she says, but it inspired others to rise to the challenge.
"My first year as principal I hired 16 new staff members,"
Smith recalls. "By then I knew I needed people who were
committed to teaching every single kid in the school. Most of
those who applied had good skills, but beyond that we were
looking for teachers wlth.goo4heort$,hose wno had amission i
'and wholnad the courage fo VticK it out! That's Ivhat'we looked
for from then on, and that's what we got."
.it;..
Cary Varela was one of those who showed up for an interview
that year. "I was recently divorced, raising a daughter alone,
and looking for a place to put down roots. Dawn asked me to
commit to five years. She said she was looking for someone who
was going to make a difference." Varela adds, "I feel I have .
found a community here. I have no intention of leaving." Not
that the work is easy. "As a bank teller I used to think that
getting held up at gunpoint was hard, but this is harder" she
says. "It's the hardest job I've had, but it's also the most
rewarding."
As Varela talks, her second-graders have gone home for the day
and she is waiting for an ex-student, now a sixth-grader, to
come in for a tutoring session. She ran into him at the Safeway
in Madras the other day, she says, and "when he said he was
having trouble in school, I told him to come see me. I feel
responsible." ,(,
Six years later, nearly half of those teachers hired in 1993 are
still at Warm Springs, and turnover of staff hired since then
has slowed to a trickle. "The teachers that Dawn recruited have
stayed because of her ability to retain them," says Keith
Johnson, Assistant Superintendent of Jefferson County School
District, "and because they are a unique bunch of young people.
The sense of community among her staff is really rare, and nice
when you can get it."
The first challenge facing Smith and her team was to gain
control of student behavior. "We came up with behavioral
guidelines for every area of the school," says Smith, "and we
wrote them down: 'This is what it looks like. when students are
in the hallways; this is what assembly behavior looks like; this is
what a classroom should look like when the teacher is doing
direct instruction.' And then we agreed on how we were going to
teach those behaviors to the children."
Varela gives a good example of a staff-initiated innovation. "My
first year here, the average first-grade reading score was 17
percent. So the kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade
teachers formed an action research team and got money from a
state department grant to hire a reading consultant. Darla
Wood Walters, who lives in Bend but is from New Zealand, came
to the school and trained the K-2 teachers in a reading and
writing technique we call the New Zealand method. The next
year the program went schoolwide. It was exciting that agreed
to try it."
Varela was so inspired by the success of the method that she
paid her own way to New Zealand to see the program firsthand.
Last year the reading scores for Warm Springs first-graders
had climbed to the 40th percentile.
Other professional development initiatives unique to Warm
Springs include inservice training for new teachers by tribal
members on the history, infrastructure, and customs of the
tribe, such as those around death and grieving. All Warm
Springs staff are encouraged to take advantage of native
language classes offered by a tribal Culture and Heritage
Department.
A partnership with
Lewis & Clark
In 1998, with the ESL classification in hand, Warm Springs
joined forces with Lewis 4 Clark College in Portland to create a
unique, onsite, ESL teacher-training program. Dr. Lynn Reer,
Visiting Assistant Professor of Education at Lewis A Clark and
respected by colleagues as one of the best language-acquisition
experts in the Northwest, worked with Smith and Johnson to
design a program of instruction to equip teachers to work with
the special needs of Warm Springs students whose language is
caught in transition. The program consists of six classes, given
onsite by Lewis A Clark instructors. The classes are offered on
weekends through the school year and also during the summer
academy, which in 1999 served as a "laboratory" for staff
training.
"I was absolutely delighted and touched by how much the Warm
Springs teachers care," says Reer. "They respect the community
and want to know more about how to include their students'
.,- experiences, culture, and home life in their classroom
1 instruction. Jhey work hard and are eager, to pick up on anything
. we bring them."
The last class of the two-year series is scheduled for June.
Some teachers will earn their ESL endorsement, while others
will put their credits toward a master's degree.
The Future
7 W rt
,vlL J
Slowly, change began to happen. The graffiti disappeared, the
daily trashing of the bathrooms stopped, students began to walk
quietly in the hallways, and they learned to pay attention when a
teacher was talking. "No principal before Dawn was able to get
control of the kids' behavior," recalls Johnson. Today the
school appears to a visitor as a model of decorum as nearly 400
youngsters move between several buildings through the rhythm
of a crowded school day.
According to her staff. Principal Smith also has a particular
talent for promoting creative professional development. "I've
never been in a school like this, where everyone is encouraged to
go out and gather information and bring it back to share," says
Varela. "It's not an attitude of 'we'll try anything,' but if you
can show her research, or a rationale, or at least some good
example of others who have tried it, she's willing to send us for
training or bring training here."
Native language teacher Dallas Winishut Jr. helps Warm Springs
students connect with their heritage.
These days, the future is much on the minds of those who care
about Warm Springs. After a drop in enrollment in the mid
1990s due to an aggressive tribal birth-control education
program referred to as "the Norplant years," the birth rate is
up again. A surge of kindergartners is expected next fall. The
tribal government is working with the district to build a new
school on the reservation to accommodate the newcomers and
to add the fifth grade.
Julie Quaid, director of the tribal Early Childhood Education
program, feels strongly that kids from Warm Springs need more
time to build self-confidence and firmly establish their
academic skills before they leave for school outside the
community. "These kids already have a lot of challenges, and
then at age 12, to pull them away from the school and community
they've known all their lives and to put them in a strange
environment with a mix of other cultures, with teachers and
children they don't know, that's very hard."
There are good reasons for concern. Out of 100 students who
started first grade at Warm Springs Elementary in 1986, only
12 graduated from Madras High School last spring. "We're able
to retain them in grades five and six," says Quaid, "but by
Continued on page 10
Reprinted, with permission, from the Northwest
Learning Ma&azinc Summer Issue.
4.