Question 1:
Provide an example of your specific impact on students in your current Currently as an Assistant Principal in the Mastery network. Student attendance is a huge issue in high school. After reviewing student data in RP1 & RP2 we noticed a decrease of attendance between students with 85% - 89%. Based on the trend these students were not going to reach 90% by the end of the school year. I created a targeted attendance google document to track students with 85% - 89% attendance to get daily check ins from a school staff member. Members on the targeted attendance group consist of leadership team members and case managers. Each student's attendance is tracked daily and by the end of the week students with 100% attendance are rewarded with a different incentive to give students a quick reward. We are continuing to track students in RP3 and based on the same attendance percentage. We started the targeted attendance in the middle of the RP 2 with 105 students and 79 students showed an increase of attendance and 26 fell between 59% and 82% attendance. I believe being proactive in tracking the current students will have a better impact in RP3. Second issue, in R1 and RP2 the LT team noticed an increase of class cuts. In tracking the data I identified the grades with the highest amount of class cuts and also identified the grade with the most staff outage. With the data I identified hot spots throughout the day that Deans addressed. All classrooms with substitutes started with Deans taking attendance in the first 10 minutes of class. We also began synchronized hallway and bathroom sweeps the last two periods of the day which identified hot spots. I also encouraged teachers to take daily attendance for each period and text the Dean line for students that did report to class after the first ten minutes of class. After implementing the changes in RP3 we saw a substantial decrease in class cuts. Question 2: In a recent leadership trainingI completed the VIA 24 characteristic assessment. Two of my top 5 characteristics were kindness and fairness. In my personal mission statement I believe all students should have equitable educational experience in Philadelphia. During my time at South Philadelphia High School I was a part of the newly formed Equity and Inclusion group. As former Community School Coordinator I led focus groups, community events and completed a school assessment to discuss issues in the school and environment concerns that directly affected students in our school community. In my current role I recently had a conversation with a teacher about her microaggressions towards or black males wearing ski masks to school and addressing them as “criminals”. I had a direct conversation with this teacher about her words being hurtful and how her microaggression towards our young black males was unacceptable.
I completed a restorative with the teacher and student to hold the staff member accountable and for the student to feel empowered to share they have felt disrespected by staff members.
