If you are from a low-performing
school (next time, I’ll discuss higher performing schools), I suggest that you
focus on three areas to improve your school: leadership, attendance, and
reading. You should be able to find grant money in all three categories.
While a good superintendent is
important for the overall academic performance of a district, it is the
building principal that must provide strong leadership for a campus. Yes, you can have a weak principal and still
have individual teachers who perform well, but you must have a strong principal
for widespread success. While grants can
be written to try to improve the performance of a weak principal, I feel that
it is better to find someone with a proven track record to lead you.
The second problem that most
low-performing must correct is poor attendance. It is impossible to teach students anything when they are not present in
your classroom. Many low-performing
schools have poor attendance overall and pockets of downright neglect. You should be able to write grants that help
you center in on the problems that cause poor attendance and also look for
incentives to help students want to attend school.
Finally, if you are ever going to
turn a low-performing school around, you have to aggressively attack your
reading problems. Most low-performing
schools have students with reading levels two or more years below the
norm. If this is the case in your
school, you will make very little academic progress until you raise those reading scores nearer the appropriate level.
Reading is fundamental. It is fundamental to academic success. It is fundamental to student
self-esteem. It is fundamental to all
future academic growth. If your library
is not well-stocked with interesting books on an appropriate level, you need to
write a grant. If your school day does
not block out time for students to read silently every day, you need to write a
grant. If students are not aware of the
level on which they read and don’t know how to choose appropriate books
according to that level, you need to write a grant.
It is difficult enough to teach students
these days when everything in your school is working well. If you have poor leadership, poor attendance,
and poor reading scores, it will be almost impossible for you to move from a
low-performing school to even an average school. It is imperative that you identify these
problems in your school, make plans to change your current patterns, and write
grants to fund these changes if you don’t have the money in your budget to do
so.
I always loved being a principal,
but when I became a principal at a low-performing school, it was absolutely
essential that I attack the attendance problems that we had and to revamp our
overall reading program so that every student practiced reading an hour each
day in appropriate-level books. I know from firsthand experience how to turn
around a campus:
1)
Improve your leadership
2)
Improve attendance
3)
Improve your reading scores
If you start with these three key components,
you have a very good chance of actually improving your school
