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Aurora Public Schools raised more than a few eyebrows two years ago when the board of education selected John Barry, a retired U.S. Air Force major general, to take over as superintendent of the state’s third-largest school district.
“We were definitely taking a chance,” says Aurora school board chairman Matt Clark. “He was clearly a non-traditional candidate, coming from the military. But we were looking for someone who understood what it took to turn an institution around.”
And turn it did. Barry began introducing changes in the way Aurora educates its 32,000 students at a breakneck pace. New curricula. New strategic plan . New coaching method for teachers. New standardized tests . New summer school programs . The launch of a new pilot school -- the first of several. New emphasis on truancy prevention.
“We have transformed this school district on an order of magnitude to rival any in the country,” Barry said.
With the release this week of the latest CSAP scores Barry, a onetime jet fighter pilot, may feel like he’s again speeding skyward. Aurora and Denver, neighboring urban school districts with many of the same socioeconomic challenges, were two bright spots in an otherwise largely flat year for student achievement growth statewide.
Aurora showed the greatest growth in student test scores it has seen since 2002. And, Barry notes, the Aurora Public Schools of 2008 isn’t anything like the Aurora Public Schools of 2002. The challenges facing the district have only gotten tougher in the intervening six years.
“In 2002, we had 55 percent fewer English-language learners, and 25 percent fewer free- and reduced-price lunch students,” Barry says. “Those aren’t problems, but they are challenges. That’s how we look at it. You combine changing demographics with a lot of implementation of new programs, and we were still able to grow. To have that kind of growth without an implementation dip in a year when you have that many new initiatives was phenomenal.”
But the CSAP results, heartening as they were, also underscored just how far Aurora schools need to go just to catch up. Even with the growth in scores, the majority of Aurora Public Schools students are not performing at grade level in any area, and in some areas – such as 10th grade math, where a mere 9 percent of students ranked proficient or above on the recent CSAPS – are truly dismal.
“Everybody would like to see results sooner,” acknowledged Clark,. “The results we had this week are outstanding, so I wouldn’t call them a disappointment exactly, but I really would have liked us to have moved a little faster.”
Barry, who marked the completion of his second year as superintendent on July 17, is hopeful that that’s what he’ll be able to deliver in the coming year.
He figures his first year in the district was a year of planning. He went on a 90-day listening tour around the district, just hearing what people had to say. It was the year he devised his new strategic plan for the district, called Vista 2010. That’s a step-be-step approach, outlining just how Barry intends to transform the district. It includes 13 specific goals, ranging from recruiting the best staff to preparing to increases in student enrollment, with concrete actions required to attain each goal.
The school board adopted that plan in November of 2006, and it has been the district’s guiding document ever since.
Barry sees this past year as the year of implementation. And he knows he turned some schools topsy-turvy.
“We changed our entire literacy program,” he says. “We introduced pacing guides. The end of the first quarter, we introduced interim assessments, so we didn’t have to depend on CSAP to know where we stood. We introduced data teams, a major change, getting teachers to work as teams and not as individuals. We introduced data walls, that allow us to look at data by school and by subject, even down to the level of individual student.”
In succession, he ticks off half a dozen other changes of the past year, including introducing a mentoring program for at-risk students that pairs APS staffers with potential dropouts to encourage them to avoid truancy. That’s 800 volunteer mentors, including every single APS administrator.
“I have mine,” Barry says of the student he was paired with. “He’s a sophomore now at Aurora Central. It’s a powerful thing to have an adult and a student have that one-to-one relationship.”
So many changes, coming so fast, made for some tense moments, particularly with teachers, who bore the brunt of the changes.
“Last year was a particularly challenging year for teachers,” said Brenna Isaacs, the president of the Aurora Education Association, which represents the district’s 2,000 teachers. “Several initiatives were introduced and implemented all at the same time, and that certainly created some stress for teachers.”
Isaacs says that on the whole, she has a good relationship with Barry. She finds him accessible, and always willing to listen to teachers’ concerns.
“But I heard some teachers say that having that number of new things to manage, to do differently, to learn, just stresses the whole system,” Isaacs said. “It created a lot of tension and stress and pressure. My school district is a district with many challenges. Our students come with lots of needs. That’s the environment that teachers work in. I think that last year, teachers wished he had paid more attention to the sheer number of things they were being asked to do.
“I recognize there’s a sense of urgency, a need to be moving our kids to levels beyond where our students have performed in the past. I would say that teachers want John to listen to them even more. They feel he doesn’t always hear their voice.”
If his first year was a year of planning, and his second year was a year of implementation, Barry is hopeful that his third year will be a year of refinement.
“No new programs,” he promises. “No new initiatives. Now we want to get to a depth of capacity in each of the initiatives we’ve already undertaken.”
But the challenge he faces in coming months won’t come from a stressed-out teaching staff. Now he’s got to convince the public that the reforms he’s implemented are worth paying for. On Aug. 5, the Aurora school board is expected to approve a measure to put a $215 million bond issue and a $14.7 million mill levy override on the November ballot.
The tax increase is especially critical because enrollment is falling in the district, which means less state money will be available. The district could have about 1,000 fewer students than it had when Barry became superintendent.
“The bond will be offered at no tax rate increase to the citizens, but the mill levy override is a slight increase,” Barry says. “About $5 per month on a $100,000 home. We haven’t asked the population of Aurora for a mill levy override since 1990. That’s 18 years. We effectively have not had a school tax increase in 18 years. We have tremendous momentum going now, and the key message is, we can’t do this alone. We need help.”
Barry is optimistic. Early polls show 81 percent approval for the bond issue and 61 percent approval for the mill levy override. This week’s CSAP results can only help that.
As far as declining enrollment, Barry puts part of the blame on the economy, part on a loss of students to charter schools. He’s hoping a turnaround in student achievement in Aurora can help stem that loss of students.
“We’re confident that as we move up in student achievement, we’ll become the schools of choice for parents,” he said. “My message is threefold: If you want your child to be educated in an environment of diversity, send them to Aurora. If you want them to be college-ready when they graduate, send them to Aurora. If you want them to be exposed to teachers with incredible heart, send them to Aurora.”
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