TRANSCRIPT Supporting Schoolwide Transformation with Dr. Amy McCart April 2017 Allyson: Welcome to SWIFT Unscripted. SWIFT podcasts give you, the listener, the opportunity to hear the inside story and be part of the conversation about “All Means All” with leaders in the field of inclusive education and schoolwide transformation. Here we are at SWIFT headquarters at the University of Kansas recording a live podcast on the topic of supporting schoolwide transformation, and our guest today is Dr. Amy McCart. Dr. McCart is an Associate Research Professor with the Lifespan Institute and an adjunct faculty status with the Department of Special Education at the University of Kansas. She is the Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Technical Assistance for SWIFT. Dr. McCart worked in a number of urban schools including the Recovery School District in New Orleans, Louisiana; Kansas City, Kansas public schools; and the District of Columbia, Washington public schools. She was the Site Director at an agency supporting individuals with lowincidence disabilities working to improve quality of life, among other roles. And we’re just very happy to have you here today, Dr. McCart, so thank you so much for joining us. Amy: You’re welcome. It’s good to be here. Allyson: We’re excited to learn from you. One of the things I learned from reading your bio is that you’ve had experience working in a number of urban school environments including New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Kansas City. Can you tell me a little bit about what you learned from those experiences and how they’re shaping your current work? Amy: Sure. I had the great opportunity to work in Kansas City public schools and that’s actually where I started my education. I went to kindergarten in KCK here and there’s a large urban population, and then had the opportunity to go back there as a doctoral candidate. After that, I worked in New Orleans Recovery School District post-Katrina in the two years following Katrina, and got to see first-hand the impact that event had on not only the students, but the teachers there. From there, I worked in several schools in Washington, D.C. that were at risk of closing. When I try to draw a line between what are the events that shaped how Dr. Sailor and myself came to view our current work, is how so many students, particularly students who are African-American, were deeply impacted by either challenging world events or social events or ineffective supports in their schooling.

That became our joint mission, and the realization for SWIFT was birthed in the middle of an urban school in DCPS. It was Stanton Elementary School and the principal there was working very hard at trying to turn that school around and it was one of those schools that if it closed, it was really the only major thing in that environment, and it was going to be dramatic. Most of the parents there were under 23 years of age. A very young parent population, and just a lot of at-risk and problem behavior in the school. How we think about the triangle now as it relates to MTSS or as it related to PBIS, and think about how do you provide supports to students with the most significant needs? You think about efficiencies around the triangle of Tier One, a great core universal instruction. Then you have Tier Two where you’re in adding supports, and then Tier Three where we’re really intensifying. Well, what do you do when most of the school needs intensive supports? That’s really the catalyst for rethinking MTSS. We couldn’t just go in and offer intensive supports to a few, because we had massively serious challenges in all three of those environments for a variety of reasons that required that we think about MTSS in a different way. Allyson: Can you tell us a little bit about what that means? Thinking about MTSS in a different way? How does that look at SWIFT compared to maybe other places? Amy: Yeah. We think about MTSS in terms of how do we meet the needs of every single student in the building? It emerged from the concept of Response to Intervention where you look at how is the student responding to this intervention and what changes do we need to make in order for that student to be successful? The way we think about MTSS here at SWIFT is it’s really the whole school. You look right from the beginning and you say, “Who are the children in this building? Who are the teachers and the staff and the resources in the building? What is the space that we have? How can we set up a master schedule in course curriculum and tiered interventions to meet the needs of all kids?” It’s less a numbers game of, 80% this and 10% percent that and 3% this. Let me just take a picture of what my school is like right now and whatever that is, how do we use the people I have, the space I have, the resources I have to meet the needs? It’s really a transformative way of thinking about education for all instead of thinking about how do I meet the needs of this one individual over here in exclusion of others in the system? Allyson: That’s a great description of it. One of the things that you mentioned—I think it was Stanton Elementary School—you said there were a lot of challenging behaviors that were influencing the work there, and I know that you have some experience working with the National PBIS Center, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. Can you tell us a little bit about how PBIS relates to MTSS and your work with SWIFT and your experiences with that center?

Amy: Sure. That center has been a leader in the field and that’s pbis.org and it’s led by George Sugai and Rob Horner and Tim Lewis and it has done amazing work over the years on shaping schools to direct their attention towards behavior in a positive and proactive way. We learned a long, long time ago that excluding kids for discipline reasons did nothing but make the problem worse. At Stanton Elementary, that was the reason that we were called in there. Kids were running out of the building at all hours of the day. There was a lot of crime at the time. Parents were fighting with each other in the building, and it was just a very challenging situation. PBIS gave us a framework to begin thinking about how could we put some proactive things in place, a lot of reinforcement. I remember the first thing they instituted was calling every single parent by their first name, so to reengage parents in the school that had been deeply negative for many of the parents that had gone there. The PBIS Center with their ideas around evidence-based practices within each of the tiers allowed a menu to evolve over the years for people to draw on, so that they weren’t in a reactive mode regarding behavior, and they were able to think, “OK, this is a child that we had in this building at second grade that struggled. We know that he’s done better this year, but when he comes into third grade, we’re not going to wait and see if he’s gonna fail. We’re gonna make sure we have some positive, proactive behavioral strategies in place for him to be successful.” How that merges with SWIFT is in addition to operating in very similar ways in supporting schools nationally, it really looks at the academic side of the triangle and the behavioral side of the triangle where you’re providing supports across the tiers, and it really blends those two. There was a time when we had a “red” part of the triangle and the “yellow” part and the “green” part, and now all of those colors are mixed and merged because students, as we all know, have a variety of needs from academic to behavioral and they need universal Tier One support for academics, but yet need Tier Three or intensive support for behavior needs. That can shift and change all the time based on what their progress monitoring data says. At Stanton, that was the first real life application. It was a school in crisis and it gave me an opportunity there, as well as in some other schools, to try out the strategies of PBIS and get my feet wet and make sure that I had a real good understanding of behavioral challenges. One little side note that brought that to reality in one school was I was walking down the halls of Stanton Elementary and helping with teaching some hallway supervision, and I walked past the boys’ restroom and a young man was sitting barefoot on the sink with the water running. This is of course is an all-concrete, slippery surface, and so I step into the bathroom to say, “Hey, let’s kind of move out of the sink.” He jumps with his wet feet out of the sink into my arms. And I thought, you know, you’re trying to intellectualize and create an idea of what education can be for all kids, but

each and every day teachers are in classes dealing with things that you can’t even imagine and visualize. Allyson: I didn’t have a plan for that one. Amy: Exactly. What do you do with a kid sitting in the sink with wet feet? You grab him and then you help him walk down the hall. I feel like that’s it. At SWIFT, what we’ve tried to do is really step into the shoes of teachers and principals and school administrators and districts as they support teachers, and have some ideas about how they can reshape their school. But have very clear and direct understanding of what it’s like to support kids who have really extensive needs. Allyson: Do you have any stories or examples of sort of the positive change that you saw after helping teachers and supporting teachers with some of this work, whether it be PBIS or the academic side of MTSS? Amy: Yeah, that’s the great part. It’s the disadvantage of getting older, but the advantage of seeing the fruition of working with Dr. Sailor for so many years. I’ve just seen countless schools turn around their efforts at supporting children and their families. Every school that we had been in was just so deeply impacted and it was nice to see scores go up. This school, Stanton, it was slated to close. Their grades went up by numbers of years. Students just really began to excel. It took a year of focusing on behavior. An entire year, because we couldn’t teach anything but behavior stuff and try to start layering in academics to get that school out of crisis. And the same after Katrina, there was so much trauma in New Orleans that we had to allow for adults and children to heal through that. We layered in effective instruction that made sure it hit right and that it was impactful. Then of course now, in the SWIFT Center, we have our wonderful 64 schools in 16 districts, maybe 17 districts. I can’t remember the districts, and our five states. We’ve got lots of examples now and that’s what we were asked to do with this project. We were asked to develop exemplars of effective, equitable education for all kids including those with very significant needs and we have lots of examples now around the United States. Allyson: That’s great. Rewarding work. Amy: Yes, it is. Allyson: I can tell you’re very passionate about it and speaking about it. I know another thing that you’re passionate about is with SWIFT, you’ve done some work leading a task force on My Brother’s

Keeper. Can you tell us, our audience, a little bit about that initiative? What that means and what that work has revolved around? Amy: Oh sure, I’d love to. President Obama instituted a My Brother’s Keeper Initiative to encourage communities to address the challenges related to boys and young men of color. There is a lot of work also related to girls of color, as well, but our work is focused on boys and young men of color. It’s specifically related to some of the stories that I’ve been telling of being in all of these environments that I have over the years and recognizing that young boys of color often are the ones that are identified for exclusionary, disciplinary practices; are unfairly or inappropriately targeted for more punitive, disciplinary action; disproportionately identified for special education; or have racial discrimination that comes up that is very hard and micro-aggressive types of interactions. The My Brother’s Keeper Task Force at SWIFT was established to help our schools and our partners look at their boys and young men of color and their families and see how they might do a better job at making sure that they are, in fact, being equitable; listening to the student and family voice and that process; and really supporting their success as they move ahead. We’re really wanting to continue that work. We’re looking at doing some work in California and adding an additional focus of the strong Latino and Hispanic population that’s in California, and it’s got really a lot of power. People come together and tell their stories of how they’ve made it in this world and people of color have just had a really rough time. There’s a lot of fear now for folks that came to this country in a variety of ways about what will happen and it’s an opportunity to expand those conversations and to feel safe. That at least in terms of education, that we’ve got their backs and we’re with them and we care and take care. Allyson: Such important work. Amy: Yeah. Allyson: Well, I know that not only do you have these vast experiences as a professional in the field, but you also have a different perspective as a parent. Can you tell me a little bit about your experiences with your own children and how that shapes your thoughts in your current work? Your own children being in school and their experiences in school and how that shaped your thoughts about moving forward in education? Amy: I would love to talk about my children. Allyson: Children, I know that’s always a fun topic.

Amy: I have three daughters and they’ve been coming to conferences with me on and off throughout the years. I have one daughter who was identified as gifted and had an IEP for that; and I have one daughter who had learning needs and was identified for an IEP for that; and then I have another daughter who was not identified for anything and just went through the system much like I did. I probably learned the most, regarding the need to advocate, as a parent for my child with learning needs. The system was failing her and it was an opportunity for us to grow as a family in partnership with our school and coming together. It taught me that our current IEP system and our role within that is less than perfect. Having a Ph.D. in Education, I still struggled to have the IEP work for my daughter in a way that helped her get ahead. It was so much more about the relationships with the teachers that she had and the principal and the general educators in the building working with one another to support her success. I get to check the box that all three daughters made it through and are doing okay, so far. Allyson: I think you can check that box. Amy: Yeah, they’re doing good and it’s good to stand back in the shoes of a parent and remember how hard it can be on that side. Allyson: Absolutely. These two questions might be a little related, but at SWIFT we talk a lot about why inclusive education is important and I was wondering what is your “why?” What is the motivator for the work that you do? What made you get involved in all of this to begin with? Amy: What is my “why?” I think my “why” follows the string of the conversation we’ve had, where just so many children come to kindergarten or Pre-K with a hope and optimism that starts to fade, and particularly if they’re a child of color, and or a child with a disability, and particularly if they’re both. Allyson: Right. Amy: How do we keep that bright light shining? I can name a number of children that helped shape that vision over the years, but it really goes back to that. It goes back to the SWIFT belief statement around education for all children. We want educators to guide education. We, as educators, don’t go in and try to be surgeons, you know? We train to be educators and we’re the people that should be teaching our children and that’s been one of the great aspects of the SWIFT work—our partners and our states and districts and schools have come together in our shared knowledge to say, “We can do this and we know some great ways to support children no matter what their needs.” Long answer to my “why.”

Allyson: This is kind of related to that—what’s your vision for the future? Where do you see it going from here 10 years from now? 20 years from now? Amy: That’s my favorite question. I have a very clear vision of where I see this and it gets rejuvenated every time I get the opportunity to talk with teachers in the field. I envision schools as a symphony where kids are like these musical notes and they’re just moving through the building and happy, and the teachers are like the orchestra and the families are there in the audience. We’ve touched on this in SWIFT where we have helped schools begin to shift into this beautiful machine that is like a symphony. Kids move to the classes and the teachers where they need, and they move out of that and kids aren’t receiving services based on a label or a predetermined space or slot or funding. But rather every child that comes into the building the teachers look around and the administrators look around and say, “Okay, how can we best support this child?” And that with every single child that comes in, they say that. Then that’s when that symphony begins to emerge and it’s complex. It’s not a tune; it’s a symphony. Each person in that orchestra has a very important role in making that music happen. That’s what I envision. That’s beautiful art language, but what’s great is we have actually the very specific tools at SWIFT that do that, that help build that—the tiered intervention matrix, the master schedule, the resource mapping and matching that we have, intervention matching. All of these tools that we have on our website that are able to help us realize that future symphony for our schools. Allyson: I love that description and I love the first thing you said is you see that the kids are happy. Amy: Yeah. Allyson: Such an important part of education that sometimes gets lost, if not the most important part. Amy: Right. Yeah. Allyson: It should be. Amy: Yeah. Allyson: I love that. As we’re finishing up, is there anything else that you’d like our listeners to know or any advice that you’d like to give to those who are on the ground out there in the field?

Amy: I think that often we feel, as educators, defeated. If you’re in the role of an educator or an administrator or on the district team or a special educator trying to make a difference and you just feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders, because you’re trying to do right by kids and you’re bogged down by paperwork and bureaucracy and the new rule that’s coming this way and the new policy of that way. Know that there are people working out there in support of you to help you find the answers so you don’t have to find them all on your own. And know that you have the power to change a life and if on any given day or with any given year, it’s not as much as you hoped, it’s still huge. I guess the advice is, stay the course and make your change happen as you can and brush your shoulders off with the rest. Allyson: Keep going. And luckily, SWIFT has some resources and tools that are free and available to anyone that they can find on swiftschools.org to help through that sometimes difficult process of supporting all kids. Thank you so much for your time today. It was very enlightening and so great to hear your stories and how those stories have helped shape what SWIFT is now. We really appreciate it. Amy: Sure. I’m happy to be here. Allyson: If you want to know the full story about schoolwide transformation, just go to swiftschools.org and click on “SWIFT Talk” where you can find more stories written by leaders in the field of schoolwide transformation. These leaders include school administrators, teachers, parents, and others who are promoting “All Means All.” SWIFT is a national K-8 center that provides academic and behavioral support to promote the learning and academic achievement of all students including students with disabilities and those with the most extensive needs.