St. Ignatius Middle School staff gets $25,000

Teachers and staff at St. Ignatius Middle School recently split a $25,000 award after the school was recognized by the state's Office of Public Instruction for significantly increasing student academic achievement over the 2003-2004 school year — one of only three schools statewide to be recognized for such an achievement.

A letter from state superintendent Linda McCulloch was presented at the May school board meeting, praising the staff for significantly improving student performance as measured by the standardized tests given under No Child Left Behind testing criteria. Under NCLB criteria, students are broken down into subgroups based on ethnicity, gender, English proficiency and numerous other categories, and St. Ignatius teachers and staff were able to substantially improve test scores in many of the subgroups over the past couple of years, superintendent Tim Skinner said.

"They presented this award to three schools in Montana, and it was for outstanding improvement. Our (middle) school had been on improvement with the standards from No Child Left Behind, and for the last two years, the staff has worked diligently to improve standards for kids," Skinner said.

While the high school and elementary schools both have made Adequate Yearly Progress over the past couple of years, the middle school had been on the "needs improvement" list kept by OPI, until this year, when it also made AYP. Under NCLB standards, a school — and even an entire district — can be labeled as needing to improve if even one subgroup of students don't make AYP. However, all three St. Ignatius schools made AYP this year, Skinner said, which was based on test results from the 2003-2004 school year.

According to the letter sent to Skinner by McCulloch, the $25,000 award could have been used "for the betterment of your school in educationally meaningful ways, including awards to teachers and principal as you see fit," and Skinner said it only made sense to give it to the staff. The staff received their checks toward the end of the school year.

"I talked to the school board about it and because of the extra time they put into instruction, we thought they deserved it. I went to the middle school team and told them we had a $25,000 bonus, and they actually took it a step further and decided to include everyone who worked with the middle school students, including teachers in other schools who had one or two elective classes with middle school students in them," Skinner said.

The bonus was divided up based on full and part-time status, so that those who were full-time middle school teachers received more than a teacher who just taught one middle school elective course, for example. Nine full-time teachers received a little more than $2,000 each, while other teachers and administrators received amounts ranging from $131 to $1,685.

Skinner said it was nice to make AYP this year, but that the middle school teachers deserved the money for more than just good test scores.

"Frankly, my rationale for giving the teachers the bonus goes far beyond the test scores. It's the outstanding improvement in the learning environment and the school culture," Skinner said. "It was a great effort by the teachers to improve the learning environment."

The teachers and administrators who shared in the award money included Jennifer Brander, Stacey Pule, John Fleming, Loretta Adams, Christy Krantz, Richard Martin, Pam Brower, Susan Batiuchok, Penny Nord, Steve Picard, Jason Sargent, Steve Woll, Jo Phillips, Marlene Lodge, Justin Krantz, Matt Young, Terry Cable, Erica Allen, MaryAnn Erickson, Connie Trudeau, Al Solander, Dixie Daniels, and David Durglo.