TRANSCRIPT SWIFT features in action at Irvington School in Portland, Oregon With Kathleen Ellwood June 2017 *Transcript edited for readability 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. We’re here recording a remote podcast on the topic of SWIFT features in action at Irvington School in Portland, Oregon. Our guest today is the principal of Irvington School, Kathleen Ellwood. Welcome, Kathleen. Thank you so much for doing this with us. Kathleen: Thank you so much for letting me share some of our experience. A: Great. We’re so excited to hear from you. I thought we could just start with you telling our listeners a little bit about Irvington School and your role at the school. K: Yes. Our school is a K-8 school here in Portland Public Schools in Portland, Oregon. We are considered to be an urban school. We have a more diverse student population than the majority of the district. A: Can you tell me a little bit about your school’s visions? What sets Irvington apart? What does your school believe? K: Our school actually likes to look at the whole child. We have that focus of academic achievement, but we also are very focused on racial equity and social justice. We want our classrooms to be reflective of the communities that we want to see within society. A: Great. How did you come up with the vision for your school? K: We actually had a very lengthy visioning process three years ago. Our leadership team that was formed when we joined the SWIFT grant … we ended up combining our school’s site council with our leadership team and we drafted some ideas for what we thought our vision could look like for our school. We then vetted those ideas with a number of stakeholder groups and committees within our staff, but also we have a number of different parent groups that we try to get input from

regularly. We came down to three choices for our top picks, and then we wanted to get input from a broader community. Our leadership team realized that even with all the parent meetings that we have—our PTA, our families of black and brown students, our Latino families group, as well as Parents Increasing Equity—that was still only representative of about 50 to 60 of our families, and we have a student population of about 465. We decided we needed to try to catch parents where they were. What we decided to do was to put our options up, as well as options for our school—our CAP plan—our Comprehensive Achievement Plan—up on a big bulletin board and roll it out every morning, because what we realized is that most of our students walked to school. We have that luxury being an urban school; however, we do have a student population that has had to move out of the area due to gentrification. We have a lot of foot traffic, but we also have a lot of folks dropping off in the mornings. What we did for a period of about two weeks is we actually took those rolling bulletin boards outside each day and had parents and students vote using a dot activity…you know, just a colored dot that you often see in trainings. They received five dots and they were able to spend their dots however they like. If they thought something was a better choice than something else, they could spend more than one dot on that option. We not only did this with the foot traffic in the back of the school where the students congregate, we also actually rolled the bulletin board up to the cars where the cars drop off students and did a drive-through option, because many of our parents don’t have time to park the car, get out of the car, and come on over. We had sent the information to the parents in advance and the parents could basically come and tell us how they wanted their dots spent there. We stood there with the bulletin board right there. We did a similar process to get staff input and additional student input, and basically used that to guide the development of our vision. What’s really interesting is that we ended up having to compromise, because what we realized is that the staff was focused on the whole child, whereas our parents were also focused on academic achievement being a priority. We ended up combining the two concepts and the two features as opposed to just basing [our decisions] on majority vote. We wanted to make sure that all voices were honored in the process. A: That is such a good idea. I’ve got to say I’ve never heard of a drive-through option for getting parent and student input. That’s a great idea for really getting input from all those stakeholders and then combining it to create your shared vision. K: Well, it’s really a matter of figuring out where the parents are. A: Yeah.

K: In the past, I worked at Title I Schools and I would actually go to housing project community centers. Or because I had a number of students bussed to my previous positions in Long Beach Unified School District in California, I would actually go to their home schools and hold meetings there at a school that was actually within walking distance. I kind of had learned that in my past teaching experience and tried to bring that here. A: That’s great advice for other principals, too—just to meet families where they’re at, and this is a great example of that in action. While you were talking about that you referenced your school’s leadership team and it sounds like they were really instrumental in this process, as well. Can you tell me a little bit about the teaming structures that you have in place to support your work and what the role of that leadership team is? K: Yes, absolutely. Our leadership team was initially created to discuss SWIFT and how we would implement the SWIFT Framework at our school. But it soon transformed. As I said, we ended up combining our school site council because we realized that both teams were talking about a lot of the same issues and decided to vet all of our committees through our leadership team, so that was kind of our guiding body. On our leadership team, we took care to have representation from all grade levels. We don’t have all nine grade levels represented, but we have a representative from, say for example, K-1, 2, 3, so on and so forth. We also took care to try to make sure that the leadership team was also representative of our community, so we have one parent representative from our PTA. We had to work really hard then to also bring on a representative from our families of black and brown students group, and then also a representative from our Latino families group. It’s taken a few years to actually get those representatives to feel comfortable coming into that meeting space and participating. We initially had student representatives, but we had difficulty because of the time of the meetings. When it was convenient for the parents, it wasn’t convenient for students. And quite frankly, they were just flat out bored part of the time. A: I wonder why. K: I don’t know. It’s such exciting things. What we did is we started [telling the students], “This is when we’re talking about something that pertains directly to the student body. Could you come to this meeting?” And just having them come for parts of the meeting. That still was difficult for the families, so what we’ve done instead is we now will take certain things to our student leadership group, which is representative of the student body. Get their input. We always invite them, of course, but they rarely attend, so we’ve had to find this alternative way to get input from the students and then bring that to the leadership team.

A: Great. It sounds like you’ve found some ways to really make that team efficient and to get input from lots of different stakeholders. I’ve also got to tell you that you’re a little bit of a movie star. I saw some examples of your school’s implementation in Dan Habib’s SWIFT Film, Together, which our listeners can access at SWIFTschools.org on the SWIFT Shelf. In that film you specifically talk about your school using resources creatively. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what you mean by that? K: Yeah. When we looked at the SWIFT framework of the school, when we started out as a SWIFT School, we had a lot of components of a framework already in place. We had strong PBIS work already happening here at the school—culturally responsive PBIS. We had other components already in place, but what we really wanted to focus on was the inclusion of students in our school who were in two self-contained classrooms called Intensive Skills Classrooms. These were students experiencing cognitive disabilities of one type or another where it had been determined that a selfcontained setting would be the most appropriate placement for them. We wanted to see that shift. Each self-contained classroom had one teacher and three paraprofessionals assigned to 12 to 16 students. What we decided to do was to shake up that model and we wanted each of the students to actually be a part of a classroom community, a full part of the classroom community and to actually be on the roll sheet of that teacher as opposed to having these separate roll sheets for these self-contained settings. What we did is we had to look at all of our resources and we literally looked at all of our teaching staff. And now when we’re planning out our year—we’re actually in that process right now—we have a pocket chart where we have each student with an IEP in there for each grade level, as well as any other students who may fall into a Tier Three category in one area or another, such as reading, writing, behavior, because of course kids aren’t Tier Three across the board. A: Right. K: We take all that into consideration for each grade level and kind of decide how to distribute our staff with special education licenses. We don’t just count teachers. We see our paraprofessionals as very valued members of our instructional community, because many of my general education teachers have really not done much Tier Three instruction in the past. However, our paraprofessionals are absolute experts at conducting small Tier Three groups, because that’s what they’ve done throughout their career in the self-contained setting. They’re highly valued as we sort out how we’re going to use our staff and where the supports are needed. We create what we call Extended Professional Learning Communities. For example, my kindergarten and grade one general education teachers have a special educator who works with them, as well as an educational

assistant and they’re seen as an extended PLC time. And so, each team is given time to meet at our staff meetings. I have the first 45 minutes of the staff meeting time designated just for anyone who works with those students and that grade band to meet together and discuss how to best support students. Everybody—the general education teachers, the special educator, and the educational assistants—is responsible for all those students in the grade bands, not just for students they case manage or students they have assigned to their roll sheet. But we’re starting to look at the students more collectively and take more collective responsibility, and that’s thanks to SWIFT. Because when we started, Jessica, who was working with us at the time, challenged us to look at funding labels and how limiting they were and expand our thinking about how can we use our staff more creatively. We have these great resources. We have these expert special educators who know how to differentiate instruction. And we’ve got these general educators who know core content the special educators weren’t very familiar with. So how do we bring those two talent pools together to best benefit all students? Because as we all know, we have students who are just as needy as a student who might be labeled as needing an IEP but who just don’t qualify for an IEP. This way we’re using our resources more collectively and just thinking of how we serve our students differently. A: I love how you describe that whole process. At SWIFT, we talk about inventorying your resources and thinking about how you’re using those, and maybe using them in a different way that can better support all students. I think the example you gave is perfect for describing that process. K: Yeah, and there are lots of tools on the SWIFT website that actually lend themselves to supporting that process. A: Great. Great. I’m glad that you found those helpful. For our listeners you can access those tools from the SWIFT website, SWIFTschools.org. Some of those tools are found on SWIFT Guide that you can get to from the SWIFT website. I also love that you talked about how you built in that time for planning between the general educators and special educators, the paraprofessionals that are working with those students. That’s such an important component of it, but it doesn’t always happen, so thank you for sharing that. K: Yeah, that was a big challenge because our paraprofessionals have a different contract from our teachers, and so they, they do not have to stay as long on our staff meeting days. One thing I can do as an administrator is offer to flex their time or find a way to pay them extra hourly to stay longer. But the reality is, at my particular school, we have a lot of young families, so people didn’t want to stay late even with that flex time being offered.

A: I understand that. K: Or the extra pay. Yeah. I had to find ways and they’re working with kids all day. The paraprofessionals are with students for safety needs or line of sight duties and things like that. Literally the only time we had was that little bit of after school time before their contract ends. Even though it’s taking up professional development time, I feel that some of the richest professional development we can have as educators is having time to collaborate with one another. A: I agree. Thank you so much for sharing that. Another thing that I saw in the film, Together, that features Irvington, were some examples of co-teaching. Can you tell me about what co-teaching looks like at Irvington and what supports you’ve had to put in place to help make it affective, because I know it can sometimes be challenging? K: Yeah. Our second year as part of the SWIFT program we were able to basically wheel and deal with our district and do a co-teaching model. We had a third-grade classroom where we had one full-time general educator and one full-time special educator working together all day, every day. The special educator literally had no other responsibilities other than to support that third-grade classroom. What we saw with our data is that the academic achievement far outpaced other classrooms. At that third-grade level, that’s where you start to sometimes identify potential learning disabilities or other things that are blocking a child’s ability to be successful academically and behaviorally. We were able to nip a lot of things in the bud, as we say, and just kind of catch some at that earlier age and do that intervention. K: Through those interventions, we actually in some cases prevented students needing an individualized education plan. They were able to use a 504 Plan or teachers were able to modify things in their instruction to support them. We definitely saw huge success with that model, and I would love to see that across the board—even one special educator for one grade level where there are co-teaching opportunities. However, the following year, reality set in—physical reality—and that was not something the district could support. As I said, we have different grade level bands. I have my K-1 grade level band with a special educator and educational assistant working with the general educators. Then I have another grade—grade five, for example—we had 18 students identified as Tier Three, either due to having an individualized education plan or for other reasons that didn’t qualify for an individualized education plan, so we assigned one teacher and one paraprofessional just to those grades. The way our co-teaching has worked has varied based on the number of people working together.

For example, that fifth grade special educator who’s only working with two teachers may do a lot of walk to reading and walk to math and she’s able to do co-teaching, as well as parallel teaching with those two teachers. Then I’ve got another special educator who is working with five students and the amount of co-teaching that she is able to do with those, within those grade bands, is not quite as significant as the fifth-grade teachers. It really varies again from grade to grade based on student need and based on the level of support that we put into each grade level. You might’ve seen Katie Lee who is our Speech Pathologist. She was featured in the videos. A: She’s wonderful. K: She actually serves all grade levels. She finds a way to get in and co-teach at a number of different grade levels in a number of different ways. One of the things she does that I love the most is she’ll actually go into our kindergarten classes, and as a Tier One support, go in and teach the whole class different things your mouth does when it’s making different sounds. If you’ve ever done LindamoodBell, it’s basically teaching them those different mouth positions and things of that nature that she does in speech therapy. But I do believe that because of that Tier One intervention that we may have helped certain students become aware of that in their minds as they’re reading and speaking, and students who might have needed speech therapy ended up not needing it in my opinion. We have a lot of great co-teaching opportunities going on like that. I found that mandating it isn’t effective in any way, shape, or form, but creating the space and the time for planning it happens very naturally. A: Thank you for sharing that. That’s a great example of how sometimes it can be challenging because of limited resources and differences in staff personalities and things like that, so I think you’re right on when you say this isn’t exactly something you mandate, but that happens more naturally. And I love how even when you were given certain challenges, fiscal challenges, that you really got creative on how you did that and how you assign one per grade level. And I love that you’re using related service providers to meet some of that need in that role. K: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I do believe that one special educator and one general educator is a fabulous model, like it actually benefited all of our students in that class. A: Right. K: I would love it if we could make that investment in education. However, that’s not the reality, but it’s pie in the sky. Maybe I’ll make it happen in the next, later in my career.

A: I think if anybody can, Kathleen, you can make it happen. In the meantime, you’re really working with the resources that you have and you’re doing that in creative ways, so I think that’s really great. You did reference when talking about co-teaching that you felt like the data was really supportive of that when you were able to do it in the model that you liked. What role has data played in guiding your decisions in general, or other decisions of your leadership team? K: Yeah, data plays a big role. When I started at Irvington six years ago, I started as an assistant principal under Lisa McCall who is actually a fabulous principal we had in place when we climbed on board the SWIFT train. When I started, our staff just was not used to looking at data, mainly because our district does not have district-wide data collection systems in place. Lisa and I were able to shift that mentality. She came from the state of Washington and I came from California where databased decision making is emphasized and we obviously had extensive training in those areas. We brought a lot of training from those states to our school and started finding, started making decisions about what data we should collect because I’m also very opposed to collecting data that is absolutely useless that you can’t use to actually inform teaching. A: Sometimes we drown in data, don’t we, as educators? K: Yeah, and that’s like what we’re asked to do as educators all the time. If it can’t help my teaching, I don’t even care, you know? A: Right. K: Currently at our school, our leadership team looks at schoolwide data. Our grade level professional learning communities look at grade level data, both behavioral and academic, and we use SWIFT to track our behavioral data. Our individual grade level PLCs look at individual student data, also. Our culturally responsive PBIS team—our school climate team—looks at common area behavioral data, and then again at the grade level PLC level we look at individual student data, so we’re looking at data in a variety of ways. Whenever we look at data, because of our racial equity focus, we always look at it with a racial lens because we don’t want that to escape us. What we have found at our school, for example, in our Smarter Balance Assessment last year, our school scored a level five as an average overall, which is the highest level you can get. We were dropped to a four, because of our participation rate. We had a number of folks opt out. However, our black students, if you look at the data with a racial lens, scored at a level one which is the lowest level, which is actually below our ESL students. Even with all of our racial equity work and everything else, we’re scratching our heads, going, “What do we need to do differently because something here isn’t working?” But if we’d just gone by that schoolwide number, and said, “Ooh, we’re at a level four,

level five!”, we wouldn’t have even noticed that we had a specific group of students who were not being successful. A: That’s a really good point of how important it is to consider those subgroups that are oftentimes marginalized. It’s clearly a really important part of your school’s vision and the work that you do. K: Our data also shows that that group of students is actually improving. We’ve actually seen growth over the last few years in our DIBELS assessments and other assessments that we give. But there’s obviously still a huge discrepancy and disproportionality. We’re making progress, but we still have a long way to go. A: Well, this may lead into my next question. My next question was what priorities does your team identify based on the data that you look at? I’m assuming that this is one of your priorities moving forward. K: Yeah. A few times a year, we have to look at our comprehensive achievement plan, which is our CAP plan that we do here in Portland Public Schools. Laura Miltenberger, who is our Oregon SWIFT facilitator through the University of Kansas, has been absolutely fabulous in supporting us with really examining data in an intentional way. My leadership team looks at all the data we can possibly collect and that’s everything ranging from our DIBELS and easyCBM scores to our SWIFT data to our own parent surveys and staff surveys. The State of Oregon gives schools the Tier Fidelity Inventory, or TFI, that we use as part of our culturally responsive PBIS work. We look at all those different pieces of data. What we did this last year is I actually presented each piece of data to the staff and gave the staff time in small groups to look at strengths and challenges for each type of data. That input from the staff was then taken by the leadership team and they examined all the staff comments and made priorities based on the data, as well as the SWIFT-FIT and SWIFT-FIA assessments. What’s beautiful about the SWIFT-FIT and SWIFT-FIA is that the highest score you can get is basically the best practice for that particular area. We’re actually able to use this rubric from the SWIFT-FIT and the SWIFT-FIA to help create our goals, our action steps. It takes all the guesswork out, and the SWIFT-FIT and the SWIFT-FIA are actually tools we can use to help us guide our action planning. A: Wonderful. For our listeners, Kathleen’s referencing a couple of our fidelity tools and the SWIFTFIA is available for anybody at www.SWIFTschools.org, as well. That’s great that you’re able to use those tools that are looking at your fidelity to really help set your priority in action planning moving forward.

K: Except for I’m trying to avoid the acronyms. A: I know. Even I’m like don’t ask me what the letters mean all the time, because there’s so many acronyms in education. You have to be careful with that sometimes. K: I know. A: Well, Kathleen, you’ve given so many great examples of how you’re really taking the SWIFT features and putting them in action. Can you tell me in your perspective what the outcomes have been as a result of the work that you’ve been doing with SWIFT? K: Ironically, as much as I talk about data, I think the most important outcome is not measurable in any way, shape, or form. I know they don’t like to hear that, but the most important outcome I feel we’ve had is shifting how our students, our community, our families, and teachers are viewing students who were formerly isolated from the rest of the school population. I feel that the acceptance of students with disabilities is just as important as racial equity work, gender and sexual identity, all those areas, and those are all things we do as part of our social justice work here at Irvington. It was easy to lead into it because I was able to say, “Hey, we’re spending all this time and energy on racial equity, yet we still have a group of students who are being marginalized.” Not intentionally in any way, shape, or form, but we realized that we had a lot of assumptions that weren’t necessarily accurate. What I’ve seen is students who were, and you may have seen this out in public, often I’ll see people encounter someone with a disability that might be more significant and avoid eye contact, or fumble around and not know how to interact with that person. Our classrooms are more representative of the actual community our students will be in as they go out into the world and they are learning how to interact, how to honor differences—race, disability, gender and sexual identity—all those areas, and how to accept people for who they are, but really see them for who they are, also. I’ve seen this whole shift. For example, last year we were going to have a cut in resources and I had to say to my staff when we were talking about how we were going to apply our framework, I had to say, “Do we need to pull back from doing inclusion if we don’t have the amount of staffing to support it to the extent that we’ve had up ‘til now?” And my staff unanimously said, “No. They are our kids. We are not going back to a self-contained model if we can at all help it. We will find a way to do this.” My agreement to them then was to not accept any transfers over the summer unless they were a sibling, and that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t accept any transfers. We kept our class sizes smaller. So even though we didn’t have the same level of support that we had had last year, my teachers were so committed to the model that they were

not willing to go back to the way things had been before. I think that says a huge amount when teachers are constantly concerned about workload issues and things of that nature. That, as a staff, our philosophy was we will make this happen. All the kids are our kids and we will not go back to isolating one particular group. A: Well, I’ve got to say I think that’s probably the most important outcome that we’re looking for is when you started with, “I’m not sure this is the answer.” I think shifting views and really making that the priority for your staff is so important. What you’re saying about just “All Means All,” learning to interact with each other and not segregating certain groups whether it’s based on race or disability, or all the other things we tend to segregate people on, I think that’s a really important outcome, so thank you so much for sharing that. We’re about out of time. It’s gone so quickly. I could’ve kept talking for an hour. Is there anything else you’d like our listeners to know as we finish up? K: As rosy as everything sounds, we certainly have had our roadblocks, also. For example, this year we’ve had staffing challenges. We’ve had a shortage of staff. There haven’t been enough paraprofessional substitutes in the district, so it’s not always sunshine and roses. I’m happy to share both our successes and challenges with anybody who’s interested in hearing about it, because I also want to paint a realistic picture. Because we’re really all in this together and we have to figure out as a profession how to best serve all of our students. We’re willing to share anything about our experience with folks. A: Thank you, I appreciate that from you and that’s a really good point to end on that it is often challenging. Some of the things that you’re doing, like using your resources creatively and getting stakeholder input, and some of the things you shared are what we need to do, because it isn’t always easy and there absolutely are challenges and roadblocks to this work. You’re a great example of overcoming some of those and continuing to work to overcome more. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. K: It’s also a team effort. It’s certainly not just me. I have a whole team of fabulous educators who are committed and wonderful and they’re really the ones who are on the front lines. A: Absolutely. K: Making all of this happen. A: Absolutely. Shout out to the educators.

K: Absolutely. In fact, just as an aside, because of the movie, we kept making jokes about being movie stars. For our opening staff meeting this year, the assistant principal and I actually had gotten a red carpet, put start on it. We hung up Hollywood decorations and we handed out Academy Award statuettes to the staff who had appeared in the movie. A: I love that. K: It’s an ongoing joke with the staff. Yeah, we always try to find some way to celebrate, so that fit this year. A: That’s great. And for anybody who hasn’t seen the movie, they should definitely go check it out because your staff are wonderful and it really comes through in the movie. K: Yeah, they are the best. For sure. A: For our listeners, if you want to know the full story about SWIFT Implementation, you can go to www.SWIFTschools.org and you can click on “SWIFT Talk” or “SWIFT Shelf” to learn more about some of our other resources. 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.