Kindergarten teachers Laura Pena, from left, Josie Royall and Linda Collins go over a charting system that the school’s superintendent and principal at Odyssey Academy in Galveston devised, which tracks each student’s progress.
On a tour of Odyssey Academy the other evening, I saw many interesting things and one thing that stopped me in my tracks.
That was the principal’s office.
As a young man, I acquired some experience of principals’ offices, having made more than one trip. But this one surprised me.
The walls are covered with big sheets of white paper. The papers are labeled with the names of subjects — third-grade math, for example.
In the margins are measures of performance by grade level. Lined up with those measures, as if on grids, are hundreds of color-coded sticky notes, each with the initials of a student at the charter school.
At first, I thought an avant-garde artist might have lost his mind.
Then it began to sink in: The principal knew where every student stood — in every subject. It was all there: those performing below, at and above grade level in every class at the school.
Odyssey’s principal and superintendent, Jennifer Goodman, wasn’t in her office. She was leading a tour of folks who were looking at the school’s new building at 61st Street and Avenue S in Galveston.
I asked Karen Mowbray, the school’s chief financial officer, so many questions about how the school worked that she finally suggested there was something I ought to see. Then she showed me the principal’s office.
Like Ambassadors Preparatory Academy, the other independent charter school in Galveston, Odyssey has been recognized for its academic achievement. But not all the students at the school are performing at grade level.
Odyssey had 410 students before Hurricane Ike. But its campus was flooded, and space was limited last year in borrowed quarters at Moody Memorial First United Methodist Church. Enrollment dropped to a figure in the 300s. This year, Odyssey has a new campus, and enrollment is up to 507. The school took on many new students who aren’t performing at grade level.
You don’t take on students who are struggling, of course, unless you’re confident that you can do something about that.
Each teacher has a plan for each student.
I suppose every school in the country has all that information about every student in every subject somewhere on file. And I suppose every teacher must have a plan for every student.
But the décor in this office was surprising. You get the idea that all that information and all those plans aren’t going to fall through the cracks.
