The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Students exceed state averages
Crested Butte Community School principal Stephanie Niemi and Director of Special Services Marta Smith, who both serve on the District Math Committee, reported to the Gunnison Watershed school board on Monday, August 13 on how well the current math curriculum is working.
School board member Bill Powell asked for the update after fellow board member Don Hagar blamed the curriculum publicly at a board meeting in June for failing the kids in the state’s standardized tests.
While some of the district’s test scores in math haven’t made the grade in the past, there hasn’t always been a cohesive curriculum in place. Superintendent Jon Nelson points out that historically math scores across the state have been low, and skew lower as kids near graduation.
However, since the implementation of new math curricula in 2010, students’ scores have improved and even exceeded the state average at every school in the district last year. And everyone agrees things can always improve.
Niemi told the board “math leadership teams” have been active through the district for a while, at CBCS since 2005. “A lot of that was triggered by the [Colorado Student Assessment Program] results and us asking ourselves, ‘What can we do better?’” she said.
In November 2007, a series of meetings of the leadership teams and even representatives from Western State College set the ultimate goal of, as they put it, improving “the teaching and learning of mathematics for all students,” and ensuring “substantial growth and progress for students at all schools.”
“We wanted our students to show a year’s growth in a year’s time and for those who fell below, obviously more than a year’s growth in a year’s time, specifically in the content areas of math,” Niemi said. Students’ progress was gauged every year when a fresh set of CSAP scores came out.
The following spring, the math committee came out with its recommendations for improving district-wide CSAP scores, which urged the administrators, first and foremost, to adopt an appropriate math curriculum.
“That was sorely lacking in this district,” Niemi said. “In Crested Butte I can tell you that we used ‘Everyday Math’ K-3. Grades four, five, we just used whatever was left over on the shelves. I couldn’t even identify what it was.”
The curriculum is just a way of teaching students the material and someone has to develop that system, so getting a new curriculum—complete with textbooks and materials for students and professional development for teachers—can be time-consuming as administrators review their options, and also expensive, going for about $180,000 for a new math curriculum.
The second recommendation was to require that each student get a minimum of 250 minutes of math instruction a week based on district standards. The third recommendation was to come up with a good way to access students’ progress in learning the math lessons, particularly in the kindergarten, first and second grades.
“We knew that the model of reading intervention, early and often, worked,” Niemi said. “So we wanted to apply that same model to the math program for elementary students.”
The teachers felt the need for more professional development, as well, after what Niemi said was “a very small need for more support for a long time and then shifting our attention to another content area.”
It was more than a year and a half later, in part due to financial circumstances, before the district started reviewing different curricula, making a choice in 2010. The curriculum can change from grade to grade, and even school to school, but the choices, Smith said, were made carefully and after a lot of research.
“The reason we went in one direction and Crested Butte went in another was about 18 months’ worth of going and visiting places that had similar student populations,” Smith said. “As odd as that may seem there was a lot of thought put into that.”
To illustrate that teaching kids is about more than a curriculum, Smith invited Gunnison Elementary School math teachers Ellie Ferguson and Lisa Brown to speak. “I love math and I want my kids to love math also. I don’t want them just to do math. I want them to understand the why,” Ferguson said. “They have to think it through.”
That seemed to be enough for the board, as they all thanked the teachers for their hard work and asked everyone to spread the word about the district exceeding the statewide average on every standardized test last year.
