How one of Alabama's worst-ranked schools had its best year - and what Pensacola can learn

To understand how far Erwin Middle School has come, it is important to know where it started.

Which was at the bottom.

Located near Birmingham in Jefferson County, Alabama, Erwin Middle School was in the bottom 5% percent of Alabama schools when Angela Bush became principal in 2019. It had been a Comprehensive Support and Improvement school since its inception, meaning it received targeted support and oversight due to issues such as high absenteeism and poor academic performance.

"We were a low performing school − low teacher attendance, low teacher morale, low performing school academically, low student attendance. We had never had a passing grade on our state school report card, which was a black eye to the community," Bush explained while discussing the school's turnaround on the Accelerate Your Performance podcast.

But over four years, Bush and her team were able to change the culture inside and outside school walls using strategic tools like school scorecards, measurable annual goals and increased accountability − all while building relationships and partnerships with everyone from parents, teachers and students, to chefs, churches and city hall.

Under the leadership of Bush and her team, the school has been removed from the Comprehensive Support and Improvement list for the first time, received its first passing school grade, decreased student discipline incidents by almost 43% within two years, reduced chronic absenteeism by 37% over two years and decreased the academic deficit of students performing below grade level by 24%.

Bush operates with the philosophy, “When you value people, you will yield positive results,” and at a free CivicCon event April 11 at The REX Theatre in downtown Pensacola, Bush will discuss how that mantra made a difference at Erwin Middle School and how it could potentially help any other school hoping to improve its performance.

What success looks like

Bush has been an educator and administrator for 29 years, and currently serves as an area director for Jefferson County Schools supervising and supporting 15 elementary schools. Before taking the helm at Erwin she served as a teacher at the high school level and as an elementary school principal.

When Bush was offered the role of principal at Erwin Middle School, she knew about the school's struggles and approached them as an opportunity and a calling, she said in interviews with CivicCon and the Accelerate Your Performance podcast.

"For me, just thinking about the challenges, the barriers, it was all exciting to me," Bush told CivicCon. "I started to shift my thinking to instilling hope, self-worth and value into the community."

Listen: CivicCon podcast with Dr. Angela Bush

Bush came into Erwin just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and student absenteeism only worsened during the COVID lockdown, further diminishing student performance.

Early into her tenure, Bush began a partnership with Studer Education, an organization that works with educational institutions across the country to support "system-wide continuous improvement and performance excellence." (Studer Education was founded by Quint Studer, a CivicCon board member, and Janet Pilcher, host of the Improve Your Performance podcast, in 2010 and sold to Huron Consulting Group in 2015.)

They agreed that with so much work ahead of them, they needed to focus on the most impactful improvements first. So, they set two major goals: to achieve an attendance rate of 80% or above and for all students to receive a B or better grade average.

Working with Studer Education, Bush formed a diverse leadership team including teachers, counselors and coaches, and began tracking chronic absenteeism and developing a school scorecard to measure benchmarks such as student grade averages and attendance and tardiness data, with regular reviews of the data every 30 days.

"So, throughout our entire school improvement journey, our leadership team relied heavily on our school scorecard as a tool, and we used it as a tool to help us define what success looked like at Erwin Middle School, to set goals and to determine what our leading measures would be," Bush said on the AYP podcast.

The team used the scorecard to monitor progress, make adjustments when things weren't working and to celebrate wins when they were. Each individual member of the leadership team was encouraged to use the data to help identify and remove barriers for students and families.

"I must say that at Erwin Middle School, that's one of the things that we have really been intentional about: celebrating those small wins," Bush said. "And what we found is that this all created shared ownership. With that scorecard, people were actually able to see and track and monitor our purpose, why we were doing this. To look at our worthwhile work and to know that what they were doing was actually making a difference."

'What happens in the school impacts the community'

One of the key factors that helped Erwin Middle School begin making strides toward its goals was community buy-in. From the outset, Bush knew that garnering support from the wider community would be critical to changing the culture in classrooms.

"What happens in the community impacts the school, and what happens in the school impacts the community," she said.

"As a leader I've always been intentional, 'I'm going to go out to the community.' So, at Erwin Middle School, I took one day to just drive around the entire community to collect all of the business' names, churches, pharmacies, anyone that I can think of that could possibly partner with the school, and I reached out to them," she told CivicCon. "In turn, they responded. And what I learned was they wanted to help, they just didn't know what their role would be or how they could possibly help."

Bush said she was honest about the school's challenges and didn't promise overnight success. But within and without, she did commit to accountability, reliability and consistency. Every group that agreed to partner with the school received a monthly report on the school's academics, attendance of teachers and students, and of student behavior.

In many instances, the partnerships were driving forces in making the numbers improve.

"Now, we were a Title I school, so of course we receive a lot of federal funds, but you cannot use those federal funds (for) anything other than instruction," Bush told AYP. "But we needed to motivate our students and our teachers, and that's why the community came in. They provided whatever we asked for − meals, gift cards, anything that we needed."

The president of the city council helped establish a girls' mentoring group. The family judge who presided over the area's truancy cases helped coordinate monthly gift cards for students with perfect attendance. Organizations also offered gift cards and catered meals for teachers with perfect attendance.

"We give away 12 $25 gift cards each semester for students with the most academic growth in reading and math, and quarterly we partner with a chef who provides a pancake breakfast for the homeroom class with the highest school attendance," Bush added. "We've been so successful through these partnerships, but more importantly, the students are able to actually see that 'I can actually accomplish these goals. I am worthy.' They now have hope, and they feel valued. They know that education means something because they are now able to actually track their own progress."

Erwin Middle School leaders targeted 45 of the school's most at-risk girls and boys for academics, attendance and behavior, and enrolled them in the Erwin Middle School ambassadors program. Through the implementation of this program, the students improved 24% academically, showed an 85% increase in school attendance and a 75% decrease in disciplinary infractions.

At the end of Bush's four-year tenure at the school, Erwin Middle School was ranked No. 1 in attendance among Jefferson County's 57 schools and ranked the No. 5 performer among the district's 15 middle schools.

Knowing where it all started, Bush couldn't be prouder of how far they've come and all the people who helped them get there.

"For me, what has been most important is keeping people first because I truly know, believe and understand − and have the results to prove it − that when you keep the people first, you add your culture and then your strategy, you will always have results."

Bush will discuss more about her work at Erwin Middle School during a CivicCon presentation 6-7:30 p.m. at the REX Theatre, 18 N. Palafox St. in downtown Pensacola. The event is free and open to all.

The presentation will also be live streamed on the News Journal's Facebook page and at pnj.com.

Registration for the event is available by searching CivicCon at eventbrite.com. Those who register online can submit a question for Bush.

CivicCon is a partnership with the News Journal to help empower citizens to better their communities through smart planning and civic conversation. More information about CivicCon, as well as stories and videos featuring previous speakers, is available at pnj.com/civiccon.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: CivicCon Pensacola Angela Bush improving failing schools