Principal begins to turn around challenging Wichita school

The Wichita Eagle series Our Changing Schools is spending extra time in four Wichita public schools this year, including Hamilton, to show how the city’s schools are adapting to prepare a new generation of students.

The theme song to “The Fresh Prince of Bel Aire” started playing on the loudspeaker at Hamilton Middle School on a recent Monday at 7:57 a.m.

Students know they have three minutes to get to class when the song starts.

When Justin Kasel, the principal, took over the school three years ago, 15 or 20 students would be late every period. Now every door shuts at the bell, and teacher aides sweep the hallways for stragglers.

The music is a signature of Kasel’s leadership style: He tries to turn what could be a difficult fight to change behavior into a celebration.

It’s not always as easy to see as an empty hallway, but Kasel has overseen a turnaround at Hamilton, which serves some of the most disadvantaged students and has often underperformed on state assessments. After Kasel’s arrival, the fact that kids come from a tough home life would no longer be sufficient reason to be late to class. Nor would the fact that they didn’t have a place to do homework after school, or someone at home to help them in areas where they struggle, mean their education would suffer.

When the Pledge of Allegiance started over the loudspeaker that Monday morning, Kasel stared at an empty hallway with his hand over his heart.

Turnaround

Students at Hamilton face more challenges than at any middle school in the district, according to a state measure of expected performance. More than 90 percent of its students receive free and reduced-price lunches, and nearly one in five are transitioning from Spanish to English.

The state keeps track of not just how well a school does overall, but how well it does with the students it serves. It has created a formula that takes into account how the students have done on past tests, along with their economic background and absentee rates to predict how well schools should do.

By that measure, Hamilton is at the top of the district. It is one of only three middle schools to have beaten the state’s expectations, and it did so by more than three times the next closest school.

But it’s not just doing well compared with expectations: More of its students are mastering the basic material.

Scores on the Academic Improvement Measurement System test show that the number of students passing their math and reading assessments has increased by about 50 percent since Kasel took over in 2013, from about two out of every five students to now three out of every five.

A 2010 study by the Wallace Foundation showed that principals have a larger impact on a student’s success than any other factor besides teachers.

Students who go to a school with the very best principal will end their school year two or three months of learning ahead of students at that same school with an average principal, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. And those students could end the year as much as seven months behind if they attended that same school with a bad principal.

A great principal could be a lever that helps raise students out of their circumstances, and bad principals will be an even greater obstacle for their future success.

This is even more true for schools like Hamilton that serve a largely disadvantaged population, according to a 2012 study by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. A bad principal who serves more privileged students doesn’t set them back as far.

Hamilton has shown significant growth the past three years but it still lags behind the rest of the district in overall performance. The next few years will be key to whether Kasel can turn Hamilton from an overperforming school that works with a difficult population to a school that can transform its students’ lives.

There isn’t an easy answer about what makes a principal great, but a 2012 study by the Wallace Foundation showed that, instead of just being an administrator who takes care of the logistics and budget, great principals take ownership over the whole academic program.

Teachers

After a series of meetings in the morning, Kasel started his rounds.

He stopped in on a social studies class while the class wrote about the Articles of Confederation. Kasel asked a girl whether she was getting the answers from a book or from her head.

“From my brain,” she said.

That was good news because it meant the work was challenging, and the student was not just regurgitating facts.

In Kasel’s first few years, he had rearranged the schedule so that every student could, if necessary, get remediation in both English and math. Before he arrived, the schedule only allowed students to get remediation in one subject. He attributed much of the students’ growth the previous couple of years to this extra help.

Now that it was his fourth year, the students were still showing progress but not as much as in the previous years. So he was pushing his staff to make sure the students’ work was more challenging.

On a classroom observation form, he gave the social studies teacher high marks for assigning challenging work that period.

Kasel takes each of these observation forms and adds up the results to see how the school is doing overall. Education has become more data-driven in recent years, which suits Kasel: He’s a former math teacher and tries to use data to make all his major decisions.

He stopped in an English classroom where the teacher told a group that was supposed to be discussing a novel to get on task. The teacher praised three other students as she wandered the room observing their discussions.

Kasel wrote down 3-to-1 on his observation sheet. That is the perfect ratio: Kasel wants the school’s ratio of praise to corrective feedback to be 3-to-1.

He wants a school that’s being pushed to get better and one that people enjoy. Everyone works harder when they’re happy, he thinks.

It seems to be working. His first year he had to replace 15 teachers who left and more than a dozen the next year. But this past year, he only had to hire two new teachers.

He knew hiring the right teachers those first couple of years would make or break the school’s success, he said, so he searched extensively to find teachers who would be “rock stars.”

At a school like Goddard, where Kasel used to teach, he said there might be 40 applications for one open position. But at Hamilton there were often only a few.

So he had to look at who was applying at other schools and lure teachers with potential. He made a recruiting video for his school’s website, which most other schools didn’t have. And he interviewed 10 candidates for every open spot.

One of his math teachers had won the teacher of the year award for new teachers. An English teacher had been an instructional coach for years and turned down a job in Derby to teach at Hamilton. A science teacher had done real science for a number of years before being lured into a Hamilton class by Kasel. One of the main reasons they chose Hamilton, they said, was their interview with Kasel.

“I love the teachers and staff; they work their brains out and that’s what inspires me,” Kasel said. “I know all day and every day, these folks are out there busting their butts to be the best they can. I owe it to them to return the favor.”

Most of the gains Hamilton students have made in their recent test scores occurred not during Kasel’s first year but afterward, as he hired a new staff that was on board with his approach.

Kasel’s wife is a reading specialist in Andover, where his own kids go to school. But he thinks Hamilton’s teachers are often harder working and more skilled than those at many suburban schools.

“If I could transplant my staff to a place like that, we’d light that place on fire,” Kasel said.

Distractions

The district carves out two days, Mondays and Fridays, for principals like Kasel to be at school to observe teachers and give them feedback.

But other responsibilities always threaten to encroach.

At 9:37 a.m. he started responding to 20 new e-mails he had received. At 9:40 a.m. he had to be out in the hallway to make sure students moved to their next class without any problems.

Just before lunch, Kasel met with the Spanish-speaking parents of a special education student. He did it because he didn’t want his special ed teachers to constantly be pulled out of the classroom for parents meetings.

He called up a father to make sure he understood that his daughter had asked to stay seated during the Pledge of Allegiance. The father didn’t understand his daughter’s choice but supported it anyway.

“That’s something I’ve learned about middle school kids, they’re trying to figure out who they are, try on a lot of different versions of themselves,” Kasel counseled. “They’ll mature and normal out on you, but it’s kind of a wild ride.

“I’ve got a 13-year-old son at home, and he’s doing the same stuff at home, so I feel you all the way.”

Kasel popped his head into a social studies teacher’s classroom during the teacher’s planning period. A couple of weeks before, a student had to be removed from that teacher’s class for behavior. And the student had lied to his father afterward.

Now it was time for the student to return to class but Kasel wanted the parent to come in and watch a class, to see that the teacher was a nice guy who taught well and would be fair to his child.

But the teacher, who had been upset, was reluctant to let the parent in. Kasel had triple duty: He had to change the student’s behavior in the class, the parent’s attitudes toward the school and the teacher’s opinion of his tactics.

Kasel has assistant principals, who take care of most of the discipline, and academic coaches, who help lead most of the lessons with staff, which has freed Kasel to focus on giving teachers feedback, he said.

But on that Monday, one of the assistant principals had gone home sick. So when a call came in about a disruptive class, Kasel dealt with it himself.

The classroom floor was filled with paper balls and markers. The regular teacher was out sick, and her class had been taken over by a long-term sub.

“Do I have to teach you not to do these things, throw markers?” Kasel said, allowing the silence to linger until a student started to talk back. “I don’t want to play the blame game, here’s what’s going to happen …”

Kasel spent the next five minutes making students clean the room and then making students pull out paper to take notes.

“Hopefully that will buy him six more minutes to get to the end of the day,” Kasel said.

Absences

Between periods, Kasel carried around a plastic pumpkin that had been painted gold, with sparkly red paper feathers attached to the back. He was soliciting Thanksgiving donations.

By the end of the week, the school had raised $3,500 to give to charity for Thanksgiving, the highest amount of any middle school in the district.

As Monday came to a close, Kasel looked toward Tuesday. Every day was a different challenge, Kasel said, and in middle school that usually meant something funny or quirky.

But not Tuesday. Tuesday was the funeral for C.J. Crosby, a popular Hamilton student who had died in a car accident the week before. According to police reports, Crosby and two other boys, a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old, were trying to flee after a robbery.

This was the first time in Kasel’s more than three years at Hamilton that the school had to deal with a tragic death. The district’s crisis team had been at the school the week before, and the counselors were concerned about how Crosby’s sister and friends, who would return to school later in the week, would deal with the grief.

“Tomorrow is going to be a mess,” Kasel said. “Those poor kids; it’s going to be awful.”

More than 10 of Crosby’s teachers would be absent for the funeral and an uncertain number of students would be gone as well. Students had been making their own commemoration T-shirts for Crosby.

At a benefit for Crosby at a local roller rink that weekend, one girl had reported that she had been bullied. Emotions were high.

“You couldn’t not like him,” Kasel said. “He had one of those personalities, everybody knew him and liked him.”

Although this was an unusually tragic obstacle, it’s not the only part of students’ home lives that sometimes slip their way through the school’s front doors. Earlier that day a student had to go home after his aunt showed up and pulled his sneakers off his feet, which she said he had stolen.

At the end of the day, as students started walking home, a fight erupted a block away from the school. The fight was started by an older boy from the community and stemmed from an argument that started at a poorly supervised roller rink and carried over onto social media.

The two eighth-graders involved had both transferred from other schools and had been at Hamilton for less than a year. If he’d had the students for the full three years, Kasel thinks, the kids might have said something to him and the fight could have been avoided.

It was the first after-school fight of the year and, Kasel said, even though it wouldn’t have much impact beyond the two students who were suspended, it felt like a setback.

“We’re not crying about it,” Kasel said. “It’s what we do.”

But the fight exemplified one of the school’s biggest challenges: The student population is constantly changing, and some students miss too much school. Only about one-third of the eighth-graders who graduate from Hamilton will have started at Hamilton as sixth-graders, often times because their parents moved.

Deborah Diggs, the school’s truancy liaison, printed out a list of the school’s students, and about 97 of the 600 had their names highlighted on the sheet as at risk. Diggs personally visits the homes of students with major truancy issues.

Last year, Diggs had to report 70 families to the Department for Children and Families for excessive absences. So far this year it had only been four, but there was still a long year ahead.

Kasel has had to adapt so that even students who are there for a short while still learn. He encouraged his staff to adopt a curriculum built around smaller units, so that students who arrive in the middle of the year won’t be behind for very long.

The school reteaches its behavior expectations throughout the year, especially after long breaks. In part it’s because Kasel wants students to constantly be reminded. But it’s also because the new students need to learn the rules for the first time.

The school gives out rewards and puts on special events for students throughout the year, often for behavior, grades or test scores – and especially attendance.

Hamilton would put on a parent night on Tuesday, a kind of carnival where, in between throwing rings for prizes, parents could learn about the school’s policies. Most parents don’t show up for informational meetings, but they do show up for carnivals.

“We’re not mad at kids,” Kasel said. “We remove barriers, and then we go.”

This story was originally published December 9, 2016 at 4:11 PM with the headline "Principal begins to turn around challenging Wichita school."