Five Michigan Schools Recognized for Outstanding Academic Post-Pandemic Progress for Students Who Are Underserved
The Building the Hope Schools collectively demonstrated academic progress that beat state averages, along with an affirming culture of diverse student populations, including students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.
As schools across Michigan continue to work to help students recover from the unfinished learning wrought by COVID-19, five Michigan public schools stand as outliers for their exceptional post-pandemic progress for underserved student groups, offering strategies that can be leveraged for educational recovery.
The 2023 Building the Hope Schools – and Schools to Watch — serve high percentages of students of color and/or students from low-income backgrounds, relative to those same subgroups statewide. These public schools are selected for recognition because one or more of their subgroups of students — Black, Latino, and students from low-income backgrounds in particular — demonstrated higher rates of proficiency in English Language Arts and/or math than the overall state average for a given grade level on the state assessment. In addition, they have culturally and linguistically-responsive school-wide practices — including instructional practices — that facilitate students’ outstanding academic progress and growth, making them true outliers in the State of Michigan. All the schools are Michigan public schools. They are geographically diverse — located in Brimley, Holland, Lansing, Wayne and South Haven – further underscoring the possibilities of success for Michigan’s students, no matter their families’ zip code or income.
“Building the Hope Schools truly represent what it means to provide opportunities for all Michigan students, demonstrating that our public schools can make great strides for students who have long been underserved while providing culturally- and linguistically-affirming places for children from all backgrounds,” said Jen DeNeal, director for policy and research for The Education Trust-Midwest, a data-driven education policy, research and advocacy organization that works to close gaps in opportunity and achievement for all children, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, English Learners and students of color.
“These schools serve as exemplars to us all,” DeNeal said. “Their post-pandemic successes show us that academic acceleration is possible and can provide a roadmap, particularly as schools work to help our most underserved students, who were most impacted during COVID-19, recover from the pandemic.”
South Haven High School
Overcoming barriers for migrant students and English Learners motivates South Haven High teachers
BY PATRICIA MONTEMURRI
For most of the school day, Room 103 at South Haven High School is where students unleash their creativity in art classes. But for periods 6 and 7, it’s where teacher Joey Weaver brings a different perspective to the expansive, sunlit room and the Multilingual Support class he created during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Weaver, a fluent Spanish-speaker who spent two years teaching in El Salvador, works with a population of students principally raised in Spanish-speaking homes. Some of the students here travel with their families over the winter to southern states to harvest citrus in Florida or cool season vegetables in Texas but return to the county around South Haven for the springtime blueberry season.
Students who are English Language Learners at South Haven High can bring any work on any subject to Weaver’s Multilingual Support group. He walks among the high-top tables as students open Chromebook laptops and empty out their backpacks. A table of girls pulls out books to read. Another student in the Multi-Lingual Support group is a newcomer to the school and the English language. Weaver speaks with the student both in Spanish and English, as they review an English class assignment about poetry.
“You wrestle with what should and should not be translated,” muses Weaver. “My job is to teach English. His job is to get good grades.”
One student is hunched over his laptop and pondering the difference in meaning between “accept” or “except.”
“Think of an ex-wife, ex-husband,” Weaver hints. “Ex – that’s a clue. It means they’re not part of it.”
Weaver offers another assist. “Try substituting a word for ‘accept’. The word ‘received’ is good for that.’”
South Haven High is receiving attention because its students from Latino or economically disadvantaged backgrounds performed at or above average performance in the Evidence Based Reading and Writing Section of the SAT for the 2021-2022 school year, according to statewide data analyzed by The Education Trust-Midwest. Some credit for that goes to ELL teachers such as Weaver and a South Haven High faculty that vigorously weaves assessment preparation into the curriculum, alongside instructional content.
Some of Weaver’s students are assigned to the Multilingual Language Support class. Other students elect Weaver’s class to ask questions on any subject, to study, or to just hang out. Creating the class was Weaver’s idea, born from the pandemic to address the needs of a unique student population, some of whom ping-pong between schools and homes in different parts of the U.S. during the school year.
“Something that’s really important is making sure we’re not pulling kids out of class all the time,” says Weaver. “Sometimes you need to, but we do want to keep kids in their classrooms.”
The Multilingual Support class gives students classroom experience and individualized help. Some students are facile and quick with spoken English. But they struggle with classroom work, in part, because it’s not the language spoken or read at home. During other parts of the day, Weaver provides “2nd tier support” checking in on students who are English Learners in a variety of classes.
The Multilingual Support Group class “was a tremendous idea,” says South Haven High Principal Ryan Williamson, in his 5th year helming the 550-student school. “And there’s no doubt that our students are benefiting this year. Moving forward, I think we’ll also see some dividends from that also.”
Weaver pairs a heavy emphasis on data monitoring with daily collaboration with colleagues to provide support to a student body with some unique needs. Innovations necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic have become effective tools to engage students who easily can fall behind.
“The difference I’ve seen in education in the last 15 years has really been on the part of teachers. They look at their data to see if what they're doing is working. They make adjustments if it’s not. They re-teach if it’s not working. They work closely with their colleagues to make sure they're doing the best things they can do for kids.”
— Carey Frost
Curriculum director of state and federal programs
South Haven High is approximately 19 percent Latino and 12 percent African-American, and more than half of all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. >span class="NormalTextRun CommentHighlightRest SCXW60130778 BCX8">Learners, with 50 in the high school.
“Our kids when they leave school, either have a job or are raising their siblings, or doing tremendous amount of work around the house,” said Williamson. The family obligations to work also can eat into the support parents may want to provide but can’t.
“We have to be that safety net,” said Williamson. “We have to …provide additional levels of support for those students.”
The area’s diverse population is one reason Weaver brought his family to South Haven, a population of 4,000, when it’s not swelled by an explosion of summer tourists. The town is on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore and about 120 miles west of Detroit and 180 miles northeast of Chicago.
“Having lived in a Latin American country and seeing some of the struggle and the obstacles that kids were overcoming, I just wanted to support those kids and families for as long as I could,” said Weaver. He went back to school to get certified in ELL instruction.
During the pandemic, Weaver helped staff a resource room where students who were opting to join school digitally could stop in for help on an assignment or deal with a computer issue. Each student had a Chromebook to use at home, and teachers became adept at tailoring Google Classroom to suit the needs of students, and in allowing teachers to comment in writing and guide students on assignments. Teachers also filmed short excerpts of lessons for students to review online, as well as taping the entire class period for reuse.
Those teaching techniques developed because of the pandemic continue to benefit students. Students who leave with their families for migrant work outside of Michigan continue their schoolwork principally in two ways. Some stay aligned with South Haven classroom instruction, participating simultaneously or through Google Classroom, doing schoolwork remotely and emailing teachers with questions. Others enroll in online programs such as Michigan Virtual School or Edgenuity. Many participate in South Haven’s summer school program.
“Their interruption in schooling is something that’s really tricky” said Carey Frost, the district’s curriculum director of state and federal programs. “Our teachers have done a good job of taking kids where they come in, looking at the data and figuring out what the students need.”
English Language Learner specialists in the district, said Frost, share their best practices, gleaned from their own research and collaboration.
“They’re constantly looking for ways to hone their skills and then share those ideas with the general education teachers,” said Frost, “so they can have strategies that help English learners and at-risk students in general.”
Hanging hashtags
Weaver has helped coach his colleagues in methods to draw out and integrate English Language Learners into classroom activities. One method goes by the name of “Hanging Hashtags.”
“It was getting kids to come up with a slogan. They had to analyze an image… and write down their hashtag or whatever they saw in that image,” said Weaver. “They bring those together and create conversation — because you’re trying to get kids writing and speaking.”
It builds on young people’s expertise with social media labels familiar from Instagram and TikTok and draws in students who may not be as vocal or engaged in classroom lessons.
“That brings vocabulary into the picture. It brings actual conversations out. And it was basically trying to give teachers some simple activities to add to their lessons,” said Weaver.
Carey Frost, the curriculum director of state and federal programs, says it’s vital for classrooms to be places where students talk and learn from each other.
“We’ve really worked on student talk, not having a teacher stand up and lecture for the entire class period,” said Frost, a South Haven alumna. “That means encouraging teachers to work into their lesson plans time for students to be able to talk to each other, to synthesize what they know to help each other. That’s a focus that helps English Language Learners,” as well as all students who are underserved and need support,” Frost said.
She moved back to South Haven to raise a family here, attracted by home but also by how diverse the school district had become.
“Exposing them to a really diverse environment was important to us,” said Frost. “The difference I’ve seen in education in the last 15 years has really been on the part of teachers. They look at their data to see if what they’re doing is working. They make adjustments if it’s not. They re-teach if it’s not working. They work closely with their colleagues to make sure they’re doing the best things they can do for kids.”
CSI TV show inspires mock trials as SAT prep
SAT preparation at South Haven High is done systematically, creatively and somewhat stealthily. And it comes with a twist inspired by popular TV crime shows.
So that students better learn persuasive writing techniques, South Haven High lead 11th grade English teacher Kristin Day kicks off the school year in her classes by hosting mock trials to build on students’ interest in TV crime-solving shows such as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” One of her best friends is a lawyer, an assistant State of Michigan attorney general, who uses vacation days to conduct mock trials for her students. The mock trials bolster students’ analytical skills, vital in deciphering questions on critical assessments.
“So, we start the year learning about arguments and persuasion and solving crimes, and then arguing your case in front of the judge,” said Day. “They love CSI, and they see themselves as detectives and lawyers, and so they dig into that.”
“They start to learn very early that you have to have the evidence,” said Day. “If you don’t have hard evidence, you’re not going to convince the judge of your scenario.”
The mock trials benefit students’ reading and language skills in multiple ways. The students learn about argument, persuasion and evidence — all elements they can use in supporting their own reading, writing and preparing for assessments.
When Day was earning a master’s degree in secondary instruction, her thesis focused on how to ethically integrate SAT prep skills into everyday classroom teaching.
She built a spreadsheet and analyzed each question to determine which Common Core standard each type of question address. She then dissected the South Haven curriculum texts and units and evaluated how they aligned with what she gleaned from her SAT analysis. She looked for key words and phrasing that teachers can incorporate into their lessons, such as the vocabulary of SAT language prompts and how SAT essays were evaluated.
Day continues to use that technique for the benefit of South Haven High students, scrutinizing previously released SATs. She and the other 11th grade teachers study the school’s SAT reports in-depth and share problem areas with other grade level teachers to make curriculum adjustments. Day examines how to incorporate SAT-like features into classroom teaching, asking: “Where in our curriculum does this fit? How can we teach it? How do we translate that so that the kids don’t feel like we’re jamming the SAT down their throat?”
One way is by incorporating SAT language and question style into everyday classroom assignments and assessments. Instead of a teacher asking students a general question about an author’s main point or argument, it means a teacher integrates the vocabulary of the SAT to draw out students’ answers, explains Day.
In daily teaching and assignments, it means teachers direct students to ask about the “author’s intent” or the “author’s purpose” – vocabulary common to the SAT.
“This allows the students to be familiar with the tasks, language used, and types of questions on the SAT without ever really being aware of it,” said Day. “This provides consistency and ensures the students are very familiar with what is required long before they have to take the SAT. It also provides consistent data to us, as teachers, on how they are progressing in their skills.”
Day sets up practice assessments and homework that resemble SAT language arts questions, in which a student reads an item, and then is asked about the meaning of the reading in one question, followed by another asking what’s the evidence for that interpretation.
Those mock trials also are teaching South Haven High students about the importance of evidence. South Haven High’s improving SAT scores are proof.
“They don’t hear the word SAT very often,” said Day, “but they’re getting those skills.”
Fostering a community that values achievement
South Haven High has distinguished itself in educating a diverse student body, with unique challenges such as those faced by migrant students, by providing creative academic, social and cultural support.
South Haven High offers an ethnic studies course, clubs reflecting the school’s diversity and activities that culturally affirm and engage families, including two Multilingual Family Nights every school year. In May, Multilingual Family Night featured a cookout with free tickets to the Girls Varsity soccer game. Families received bilingual books and browsed among tables with information about local services.
As a Building the Hope school, South Haven staff strives to expose students to a future filled with opportunities, and the skills to take advantage of them. During the school year, teacher Joey Weaver chaperoned a busload of South Haven students to Hope College for a seminar by the Latin Americans United for Progress.
There were hundreds of Latino-American students from around the region and one of the keynote speakers was a Latino-American who is now a company CEO.
“What it did for them was help them understand how important it is for them to lead,” said Weaver, “and to know that they have people standing in solidarity with them.”