Robert Lewis Magnet School

When the doors of Robert Lewis Magnet School first opened last year, Principal Zandra McDonald had already set the bar high.

Before accepting the 125 sixth-grade students that would help inaugurate the school, administrators required students and parents to commit to certain levels of academic and disciplinary expectations.

With those agreements in place, McDonald said she worked hard to ensure the bar didn’t get lowered after the first few weeks of school.

“We were worried that the honeymoon period, so to speak, of a new school would dwindle, but it didn’t,” McDonald said. “Students continued to meet those expectations throughout the first few months of school, and with those expectations met and our teachers and parents on board, we just kept moving forward.”

Through analyzing results of assessments given during the first and second nine weeks of class, McDonald said teachers and administrators quickly saw a need to place an emphasis on reading.

At the beginning of the year, only 56 percent of students were reading proficiently at the sixth-grade level.

English teacher Linda Logan, who has been with the district since 1985, said she quickly saw the reason for the low proficiency levels.

“It was all reading comprehension, because they could read everything just fine, but once they were done they couldn’t remember anything about what they had just read,” Logan said. “That’s something we needed to address right away.”

Logan said she began working with the students to read short passages of a work and, in conversational form, discuss what the information they had just read.

Those strategies, as well as help from parents who encouraged the students to read more at home, are what Logan and McDonald said helped increase the school’s reading results.

At Robert Lewis, 73 percent of students met growth in reading, while 68 percent of students scored proficient and advanced in reading.

Those scores, coupled with high math achievements, led to the school receiving a B rating.

The accomplishment of last year’s students only fueled Logan to think about what her students could do this school year.

“I was speechless for a while; then I started screaming I was so happy, and then I started to take out all my papers and do some comparisons,” Logan said. “I took everybody’s scores and started looking at where I knew we could improve four points here, five points there and started setting individual goals for each student.”

Logan will be able to make sure those students reach those goals this year, as she also moved up a grade with her sixth-grade students from last year.

“They already know my expectations, they know what I accept and what I won’t accept,” Logan said. “It’s helped a lot because at the beginning of the school year, I didn’t have to start over. I was able to jump right into all the things I knew we needed to start working on to improve even more.”