PHOENIX — Schools that have struggled academically are seeing improvement through a program Arizona is using that is designed to help the lowest-performing campuses.
More than a dozen school leaders came together Tuesday to talk about those gains, celebrate them and discuss what still needs to be done to continue helping students.
The Arizona Department of Education is using a framework called Project Momentum.
"Project Momentum deals with the bottom 5% of schools and when they get done working with them, 80% of those schools are no longer in the bottom 5%," said Superintendent Tom Horne.
Maricopa Unified had 11 schools in the program. Several years later, only three remain.
"All of our elementaries have shown phenomenal growth," said Brandi Williams, instructional systems coordinator for Maricopa Unified.
So what does the state actually do? Michelle Udall, associate superintendent of school improvement with the Arizona Department of Education, says the program puts a mentor inside the school to help school leaders and educators.
"They spend at least six days during the school year with that principal in their own school. They also have biweekly check-ins to see how they've been doing with their goals and things they're working on changing in their campuses," Udall said.
Frequent testing is also a key component, so educators aren't waiting on outdated data to make decisions.
"It needed to be part of the instruction that was happening so we can make instructional decisions the next day and we weren't looking at lagging data to make instructional decisions," Williams said.
Nearly 400 schools are now in the program, according to Udall. Leaders of those schools meet periodically to swap ideas and celebrate what's working.
"We're in the bottom 5% and to move and make movement out of that, it has just been tremendous. The morale is improving, the culture is improving because people are feeling like we can do it," said Dr. Pamela Chandler, principal at AZ Compass Prep School.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
