We were able to make progress on both School-Wide SIP Goal and our Disproportionality SIP Goal. 

• We increased our overall graduation rate from 94.1% in the 20-21 school year to 96.7% in the 21-22 school year.
• We increased our graduation rate and decreased disproportionality in our graduation rates for our Black and Latinx students in the 21-22 school year. In the 20-21 school year, our Black students had an 81.3% graduation rate, which increased to 88.2% for the Class of 2021. Our Latinx students had a graduation rate of 82.9% in the 20-21 school year and that increased to 92.2% for the Class of 2021.
• While we still have work to do when it comes to closing the gap between our overall graduation, we were able to shrink the gap while also increasing our overall graduation rate.

What actions were successfully implemented?

• Professional Development and Alignment of Grading Practices
  • Throughout the year, we offered a variety of professional development opportunities for teachers to learn about equitable grading practices that set students up for success while still maintaining high standards for students. We know that equitable grading practices that allow options for recovery and give students multiple opportunities to show mastery will have a direct impact on our disproportionality in academic achievement between our general population and our Black, Latinx, ELL, and students with disabilities.
  • In August 2022, course teams were asked to share their common grading practices that allow for multiple opportunities to show mastery and opportunities for recovery. Our course teams were able to successfully align their practices. We believe these grading practices are also at least partially responsible for the decrease in F rates of our students.
  • Moving forward, we will continue to discuss the importance of recovery options for students and ways to provide students with multiple opportunities to show mastery with our staff. We are finding that providing multiple opportunities to students is often showing up as test/quiz retakes, which is not the only way for a student to show mastery of a skill/piece of content. We will also ask our teams to meet each August to make sure their practices are aligned to provide for an equitable experience, regardless of which teacher a student is assigned.
• Multi-Tiered Support
  • Our building was able to offer multiple professional development opportunities at staff meetings on Tier 1 UDL strategies. We’ve discussed GLAD strategies, inclusion and co-teaching practices, ways to make our classrooms more culturally inclusive and responsive and Tier 1 interventions that teachers can implement in their individual classrooms including relationship-building, PBSES practices in the classroom, and UDL-aligned instructional practices (turn and talks, quick writes, jigsaws, etc.). We believe these strategies are partially responsible for the decrease in F rates at various grading periods while also working to get students caught up from any learning deficits that were created during the COVID pandemic.  Our Tier 2 team worked to identify students at each grading period and determine the main barriers these students were experiencing. They then provided support and resources to try to remove those barriers. Quite of few of the students who showed up on the Tier 2 list and received Tier 2 interventions are students from the Black and Latinx community. Many are also students who receive support through IEPs, 504s, or ELL services. A large number of students who were on the Tier 2 list at some point were able to improve their grades in at least 1 or more class, but we did struggle to find appropriate and successful supports for some students.
  • Moving forward, we are looking to do some focused work on Inclusionary Practices at each of our staff meetings, sharing a few key strategies to ensure our staff as a whole is working to meet the needs of all students in their classrooms. We also believe that we should potentially refocus our Tier 2 team since there are so many kids who end up needing the additional support.
• Attendance Interventions
  • Working to ensure that students were in classes in order to access their education was a major focus of our building. We know that students having positive relationships with their teachers can play a major role in improving student attendance and that because of remote and hybrid learning, many of our students missed the opportunity to really form those positive relationships with school staff the previous year. Our staff dedicated a great deal of time not only working to get to know where their students were academically at the start of the year but working to get to know them as people and start to form strong relationships with them. From there, we worked to identify individual students who struggled with attendance throughout the year and then tried to implement various interventions in order to support the student. Many of the students were students who qualified is Special Education, ELLs, had 504s, or were members of the Black and Latinx community.
  • The success of these interventions was generally mixed, which unfortunately tends to be a trend when you look at research around improving student attendance. The interventions did create positive change for individual students in some cases, but in other cases, countless interventions did not seem to make much of an impact on attendance. Starting in the 22-23 school year, we plan to hold Tier 2/3 attendance and discipline meetings with students who have chronic absenteeism and/multiple forms of exclusionary discipline prior to the start of the school year to try to proactively work together to improve student attendance with students and their families.
• Essential Learning Realignment, Curriculum Redesign, and Academic Supports
  • Our departments and course teams understand that it was highly likely that learning gaps would exist as students started the 21-22 school year. Teachers adjusted and realigned their courses based on the impact of remote learning beginning in March 2020 by identifying Essential Learnings for each course.   They also worked to find ways to build more diverse experiences and real-life ties into their curriculum so students could see themselves in the curriculum. Teachers worked to find ways to fill skill gaps that existed through accelerated learning in the classroom, finding opportunities to review skills and content, while introducing new concepts. Our staff also worked to provide academic supports to struggling students by offering support during Nest. Our math, science, and CTE departments offered regular after-school ISF homework lab sessions that were well-attended and many teachers offered stand-alone sessions prior to major assessments. Essential Learnings were identified to help teachers determine what skills and content they should focus on in their classes and to allow teachers to have a clearer picture of what skills and knowledge students had mastered prior to entering their classes. Additionally, teachers offered Remediation plans that would allow students to get back on track in their classes following Quarter 1 and Academic Contracts for students to earn a P/D at various points during the school year. Our F rates decreased throughout each semester as these strategies were implemented for students.
  • Moving forward, we plan to continue to review our Essential Learnings in each course and work to make our curriculum more inclusive to all of our students. We believe this practice will allow us to meet our students where they are at and hopefully lead to more academic success and engagement. We also plan to continue to encourage teaches to find ways to offer remediation plans and academic contracts to students who are struggling but have found that students who pass a course through an academic contract may go on to struggle in the next course. There is disproportionality that exists within our D/F Data, as Black and Latinx students tend to have higher D and F rates. We’ve tried to be intentional about working closely with those students, making sure teachers are offering that support to students, as well as Tier 2 Coordinators reinforcing and reminding students of what support options are available and encouraging students or even directing students to attend. We do see a lower attendance rate of those students at after-school academic supports and at assigned Nest sessions and have been working with those communities to identify ways to make those supports more accessible or to encourage participation.
• Course Selection and Course Schedule Development
  • Our counseling and administrative team worked to develop an informative process for the Course Registration process for our student body.  Some specific adjustments that we made last year included multiple 8^th grade Course Registration Nights with students’ specific counselors and administrators so they could work to begin to build relationships with students and families.  Our teachers also worked to make recommendations for individual students. As the semester progressed, we worked to identify students who could benefit from schedule changes to improve attendance, engagement, and success rates. Our math team specifically worked to identify students who were potentially misplaced and made recommendations for individual students for changes in the 2^nd semester. This helped us work to build additional support classes for students including Math Labs and Guided Studies sections.
  • In some cases, we saw increased attendance and engagement with students we made schedule changes for. We also saw lower failure rates during the 2^nd semester of the 2021-2022 school year than we did in the 1^st semester and also have lower failure rates in the 1^st semester of the 22-23 school year when comparing grades at various grading periods.
  • Moving into the 22-23 school year, we decided to continue many of our past practices, but also met with Tier 2/3 families in August to try to build a “just right” schedule for each of these individual students before the year even gets started.
• Credit Recovery Opportunities
  • During the 22-23 school year, we offered a number of credit recovery opportunities including 6 rotations in Guided Studies and a variety of options for students to access credit recovery through Canvas and optional meetings with content area teachers. 157 semester credits were earned through credit recovery sections offered in 7th period Guided Studies and 58 semester credits were accrued through after-school credit recovery. Allowing students to access opportunities both in and out of the school day has allowed students to accrue credits in classes they struggled in, but have mastered the core content for, to make progress towards on-time graduation.
  • Moving forward, we have continued to offer credit recovery opportunities for students both in and out of the school day. We found that offering credit recovery through Guided Studies was more effective for our Black, Latinx, and Special Education students, as it was already built into a time they had planned to be at school and there was more in-person support.  We also are working to find ways to access credit recovery during the last few weeks of a semester if they are so far behind in a class so they could potentially stay on track at the end of each semester.
• Guided Studies Program
  • Our Guided Studies program had higher enrollment than it did in prior years, which provided many students with the opportunity to access academic support and credit recovery during the school day.  We also created a Guided Studies section specifically for some of our Latinx students (at their request) so they could work in an environment of their preference. Teachers worked to support kids in their current classes, but also access credit recovery in some classes if needed. Our D/F rate data suggests that students who are in Guided Studies tend to be able to improve their grades in at least some of the classes they are struggling in at a higher rate than students who are struggling in multiple classes who are not enrolled in Guided Studies.
  • Moving forward, we will continue to offer Guided Studies as an elective for students. Students in the course report finding it helpful to have time during the day that they can work on their other classes with a teacher there to support their progress.  We do plan to make some changes including trying to make sure the sections are specific different grade levels so teachers can better support students across the same grade band. We did encourage students who struggle academically to consider taking Guided Studies and also plan to suggest that 9th graders (who tend to see a drop in academic success when they initially start high school) consider taking the course. We also discussed what period was the ideal time to offer Guided Studies. Many students and staff report liking it during 7th period because they have all their work that was assigned that day to focus on, but quite a few students who have low Guided Studies attendance report that offering the course during 7th period sometimes makes it easier for them to just skip instead of attend. We’ve opted to move 9th grade guided studies into 2nd period for the 22-23 school year since those students do not access credit recovery 1st semester and tend to get distracted by the shuffle that occurs on credit recovery rotation days. We plan to continue to monitor 7th period Guided Studies attendance and revisit if 7th period is an appropriate period to offer the course for the 23-24 school year.
• Social, Emotional, Mental Health Support
  • We recognized that coming back from the pandemic our students likely have an increased need for social, emotional, and mental health support. We worked closely with our counseling department to develop SEL lessons that discussed mental health and frequently reminded students of the various resources that were available within our school and our community. We also continued to monitor SDQ results in order to connect with students and families who may need additional support. Counselors already had been meeting with every 11th grader to discuss graduation progress, but they also added 9th grade meetings with every 9th grader as well. We also created a number of small focus groups to help meet the needs of specific members of our student population. Our counselors met with small groups of students who were experiencing anxiety and we partnered with various staff members to create focus groups for our Black and Latinx students.
  • Through conversations with students and student surveys, we found that students wanted an even larger portion of SEL lessons to focus on mental health. While they appreciated the SEL lessons, they felt like the lessons did not go into enough depth.  Our counseling team worked hard to meet individually with half of our student body (9th-11th graders), and we hope to continue those meetings in future years, especially in the 22-23 school year as we have almost an entirely new counseling team. The focus groups were well-received by our student groups, with many of them indicating they would like us to continue those groups moving forward.

The Washington School Improvement Framework (WSIF) is provided by the state as part of the OSPI School Report Card to inform and guide school improvement goals and action plans. School SIP teams use additional data sources to inform their planning. Progress toward school improvement in overall achievement and disproportionality is monitored using state and district measures using a common School Improvement Data Dashboard, aligned to the WSIF.

Issaquah School District school improvement data dashboard for high schools.

Describe your SIP team process for studying the SIP data dashboard and other available data and selecting SIP goals.

Our administrative team, Building Leadership Team, and certificated staff had the opportunity to review, discuss, and share feedback related to the data and our proposed SIP Goal. Staff shared that while they were excited about the growth (particularly between 20-21 and 21-22 data), they were also concerned about being able to maintain that level of growth given the GREW waiver that students were able to access. They also noted that measuring the success of some of our efforts would be difficult as kids were still recovering from the pandemic and remote learning. When discussing if we should shift from focusing on our graduation rate to focusing on reducing D/F rates, the staff felt strongly that on-time graduation would be a better measure. There was high support around our goal of addressing our disproportionality that exists between our graduate rates of our general student body and our students of color.

Describe your observations regarding overall achievement and disproportionality that informed your SIP goal(s) and actions. Include possible root causes of disproportionality (i.e. if you were to address the causes, it would likely result in a decrease in disproportionality).

Historically, our data at Issaquah High shows disproportionality between our general student body and our Black and Latinx students in many areas including academic achievement and graduation rates, attendance rates, state test scores, and student discipline. This is an issue that our entire staff recognizes is problematic and is committed to working to address.

Borrowing from EL-16:

We believe that each student has the potential to achieve, and it is our responsibility to provide all students the opportunity and support needed to meet their highest capability in a safe and welcoming environment. We acknowledge that systemic and institutional inequities and bias exist, creating barriers for student achievement and well-being. We are committed to raising the achievement of all learners and a culture that promotes the identification and removal of barriers causing predictability and disproportionality of the highest and lowest achieving groups.

Systemic barriers include and are not limited to:

• Current and historical lack of access to resources such as academic supports
• The impact of trauma including trauma related to race and poverty
• Insufficient mitigation and support for academic, social emotional needs
• Gaps created by accessibility to learning during remote and hybrid instruction
• Lack of consistent strategies used across disciplines to address learning difficulties
• Curriculum that lacks multiple perspectives and representation
• Failure to address racial and other biases
• Lack of systemic structures to support diverse learning needs

We know that there continues to be systemic inequities that marginalize some and perpetuate advantages for others in public education, including the Issaquah School District. As a system, we must dismantle inequitable practices/beliefs listed below and rebuild a system that supports equitable outcomes for all students.

As a system, we must start:

• Increasing awareness of how educational institutions perpetuate oppression=
• Engaging in deliberate and transformative conversations about race
• Developing measurable practices to disrupt the opportunity gaps
• Elevating all voices by leveraging historically/currently marginalized voices and experiences
• Prioritizing the hiring of diverse staff
• Creating more inclusive environments for staff from diverse backgrounds
• Designing supported pathways for BIPOC candidates to pursue careers in education
• Promoting curriculum that elevates multiple stories and the American reality
• Engaging in deliberate and transformative conversations about race
• Empowering learners with grading and assessment practices
• Designing programing to eliminate racial predictability and marginalization while removing obstacles to success
• Promote PD about race/equity that is purposeful, systemic and ongoing
• Instilling discipline practices that are restorative and include student voice
• Honoring culture, climate, and student voice, in particular minoritized student groups, when making decisions
• Building relationships within the learning environment through deliberate social interactions
• Growing extracurricular opportunities in which all student groups are represented
• Creating opportunities to listen to and engage with historically/currently marginalized families
• Collaborating with community partners to support students and families holistically
• Empowering BIPOC families and leaders to contribute to meaningful organizational decisions
• Developing an equitable and fiscally sustainable spending plan surrounding family and community engagement

We must stop:

• Accepting the notion that educational institutions support all students equally
• Trusting that race has little or no impact on education
• Celebrating the elite and ignoring the practices that perpetuate the opportunity gap
• Elevating majority voices and experiences
• Hiring staff based on “good fit” within the dominant culture
• Marginalizing staff from diverse backgrounds
• Relying on historical recruitment and hiring practices that maintain the status quo
• Perpetuating current systems with barriers to marginalized populations
• Promoting curriculum that maintains a single story of the American Dream
• Assuming instruction meets all needs
• Sorting learners through grading and assessment practices without intentionality through an MTSS system that is research based
• Setting a single program/pathway to success
• Promoting PD about race/equity that is isolated, narrow and static
• Instilling discipline practices that are punitive and ineffective
• Disregarding culture, climate and student voice when making decisions
• Directing student activities and learning without building relationships without including student voice
• Growing extracurricular opportunities based on tradition and mainstream culture
• Communicating expectations to families for parent involvement
• Working in silos that set criteria for families to receive limited support
• Listening to voices that perpetuate status quo
• Prioritizing equal opportunities for families as opposed to equitable opportunities

*These lists were modified from the DuPage Regional Office of Education.

School-Wide Achievement Goal(s)

Issaquah High School will achieve a 95% on-time graduation rate by 2024 by providing students with high-quality instruction, targeted interventions, and supporting student health, wellness, and attendance.

Disproportionality Goal(s)

Issaquah High School will close the gap for on-time graduation for our Black and Latinx students.