After being honored as a California Distinguished School for the second time in four years, Hill Middle School barely has enough room for the students that want to attend. Principal Pete Davis has been in charge to receive both awards, but he was also a Hill assistant principal when there weren’t any honors coming in. We were called into the Principal’s office to talk to Davis about receiving the honor, how Hill has changed in his nine years, and what other schools can do to make similar improvements.
What’s it like for your school to win recognition like this?
For us, it’s fantastic. We won it back in 2006, and that was good too, but what makes this one different is that far fewer schools were able to meet the criteria because you not only had to meet your AYP and API targets, but all your subgroups had to meet their targets. Which is very cool, because it means all of our kids are learning. But you also had to prove that you were closing the achievement gap, which means that students of color were achieving at a greater level than was expected. In our case, the African-American and Hispanic students were achieving at a rate closer to the white and Asian students. So that’s why this year was different, because you had to also be closing the achievement gap. It means our kids are learning. It’s really fabulous to be recognized for that.
What do you attribute that improvement to?
We’re seeing the kids grow from 6th grade. When they come in at 6th grade, about 18% of the kids are proficient writers. By the end of the school year, though, 67% were proficient writers. The 8th graders did the best though: they started out at 50% proficient and they’re at 90% proficient. That’s based on the pre- and post-tests during the year. So overall, we’ve gone from the whole school being 40% proficient and now we’re at 73% proficient. We attribute that to the writing that the kids are doing every day. They’re writing every day somewhere, not just in the Language Arts classes.
How have you seen changes since the last recognition in 2006?
We’ve been doing a lot of professional development so the teachers understand the kids that they’re working with. And then the kids themselves, by the third year they’re here, they’re used to how we do things. They like the way we do things. We have a lot of student participation in a lot of things, so I think the students are enjoying school. The atmosphere is getting better every year, we’re learning more about each other and how to motivate the kids to do well.
How does an award like this reflect on the school?
There’s no money in it or anything. But the way it helps us as a school, about eight years ago people weren’t so thrilled about coming here. As we get awards and things like this, it makes our school more appealing, so now we’ve gone from being a place where people didn’t necessarily want to go to school, to a place where we have more people that want to come here than we have room for. We’ve become a place that people want to come to. That helps because you get kids that want to be here, parents that want to be here, teachers that want to be here, and when you have all that you can’t help but do better because everyone wants to be here.
We have to draw in kids from other neighborhoods, otherwise we wouldn’t have enough kids to run the school. We get most of our kids from North and West Long Beach, and now there are people willing to take the bus to school, we have parents that are willing to drive their kids here in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon, or they’ll let their kids take a city bus to get here. Anytime you’ve got that kind of push, it makes the school a better place.
You can’t run a school with 40 kids [Ed note: less than 100 middle-school-aged children live in the area], so we draw from other areas. We’re drawing off of other schools’ overflow kids. We try to take as many kids from as many elementary schools that want to apply, so that you can get kids from all over.
It seems like that could be a disadvantage.
It makes it harder, for sure, because they’re not all friends coming in. We do a thing called JumpStart, where the kids can all come in and be guests for a day. The parents come too, and we have a teaching module for the parents and the kids go through half a day of classes. That helps a lot.