‘Stat Night’ an eye-opener for Wichita parents, teachers

Ashlei Matthews, a fourth-grade teacher at Cessna Elementary School, said she was wary at first about the school’s new approach to parent-teacher conferences.

But after a full year of “Stat Nights” – group conferences during which teachers met with parents to share test data, review expectations and set goals – Matthews said she is sold on the concept.

“The relationship I created with several families can’t be compared to what I experienced before,” with traditional one-on-one parent conferences, Matthews told the Wichita school board Monday.

“There is something to be said for a group of people trying to consistently work on the goal of their child’s success.”

Cessna Elementary, in southwest Wichita, identified two years ago as among the lowest-performing schools in the state, reinvented traditional parent-teacher conferences last year in an attempt to improve school-home partnerships and raise test scores.

Principal Matt Snodgrass said the school plans a return to traditional parent-teacher conferences next week because some parents said they missed one-on-one time with their children’s teachers. But they also will continue regular Stat Nights, where parents gather in groups to see how their children are performing in relation to class-wide data.

“It’s kind of the best of both worlds,” Snodgrass told board members.

Cessna teachers and administrators spent more than six months developing the new format for conferences, which they called “Cessna University.” The first Stat Night last fall was spent addressing privacy concerns – students are identified by an assigned number or letter rather than names – and explaining terms such as intervention, progress monitoring, chronic absenteeism and AIMSweb, a screening tool.

The first time parents saw a chart with students’ scores on math and reading assessments was “the most powerful moment,” said Matthews, the fourth-grade teacher.

“To see where your child is compared to their peers is eye-opening,” she said. “As parents, we believe that our children are wonderful. We believe that they’re smart, and we believe that they’re talented. But we can fluff up our students as well.

“But there’s no fluffing up the data. It is very real and very truthful, which is exactly what our parents need at times and what they deserve to hear.”

One page of a teacher’s Stat Night presentation from February showed absences and tardies for each student in the class. One student, identified only by number, had been tardy nearly 70 times.

“Maybe they think nothing important happens before 10” a.m., said first-grade teacher Marsha Geer. “But then we explain that our reading block starts right at 9 a.m., so they could be missing a full hour of reading.

“Sometimes parents don’t understand what chronically absent means, so we wanted to show them. … Putting that word ‘chronic’ on it kind of has a little, ‘I need to get my kid to school’” effect, she said.

Geer said children whose parents attended regular Stat Nights last year showed noticeable improvement in the classroom and on assessments.

“I truly believe that my winter data looked better than it ever had,” she said. “I had some students reading beautifully last year, and I truly bring that back to the Stat Night sessions, because we talked a lot about what they could do at home.”

This story was originally published September 23, 2014 at 6:11 AM with the headline "‘Stat Night’ an eye-opener for Wichita parents, teachers."