Each week, Clover Park School District (CPSD) will highlight a school or profession in our district on our social media pages with a #SuperSchoolShoutout where we celebrate the students and staff that make our district beam with pride.
This week, we celebrated Dower Elementary School!
Dower is a Kids at Hope school that builds its culture and practices around the belief that all students are welcomed, valued and can succeed. Principal Megan Qualls and her team are all about student voice and use the guidance they receive from students to make sure everyone is supported and feels confident as learners in the classroom.
Dower staff use creativity to motivate students to be their best. With the Golden Ticket program, students can earn a lunch with their principal. Also, through the self-management program, students can access the brand-new Dragon Lounge.
This is Principal Qualls’ eighth year at Dower, and she is proud to have cultivated a supportive culture among staff and students. The new catchphrase this year is “Dower Dragons: Where you belong.”
“I have always wanted to work at a school that feels like a family and truly believes in the culture of belonging,” Qualls said. “We want every kid at Dower to know that they belong here, we want them here and they’re going to have an incredible future.”
We continued our shoutout to Dower with with reading interventionist Pam Jarmon and fifth grader Anya Davenport.
Jarmon has worked at CPSD for more than 25 years and has been a Dower Dragon for the last six. She loves the supportive culture of Dower, where all staff members work together to support every student, even if they are not their assigned teacher.
Jarmon is part of a team that includes another interventionist and multiple paras. Her mission is to work intensely with students in areas they are struggling so they can stay on pace with the rest of their class and feel confident as readers.
“We can be very specific and target the areas and skills that the student needs to improve to ensure that we fill those educational gaps,” Jarmon said. “When you work on those areas, it’s rewarding because you can see such great growth, and it’s so encouraging to see them get back in the class ready to succeed.”
Anya loves her teacher, Ms. King, her friends, the topics she is learning about in class and everything else about fifth grade. She is a very busy student who excels in the classroom and attends Russian school, Bible school and gymnastics in the evenings. “It can get really busy, but I always try my best,” she said.
Anya’s favorite subject is math, but she also cherishes time in class when she is allowed to practice her creative writing. With an ever-imaginative mind, Anya conjures up romantic comedies about brave women, charming men who turn into dogs, partying witches and much more.
Anya also improves upon her Russian studies by copying books written in Russian to practice her writing and comprehension skills. “It’s kind of fun because I’m learning more about my heritage and reading good books,” she said.
When Anya grows up, she hopes to continue expanding her imagination by exploring uncharted spaces as an astronaut.
Go Dragons!
Each week as a public service Lakewood CARES will be providing the real academic situation in response these schools highlighted in the Suburban Times by Clover Park School District (CPSD). This is data you will not find elsewhere in CPSD propaganda pieces, Board meeting agendas or “Inside Schools”. All this talk about pride without addressing the reality of academic performance is “false pride” designed by the District’s “spin doctors” to keep the public in the dark. Schools exist to educate children and until they do so there is little to take pride in. It’s nothing but window dressing to conceal academic failure. Until the real academic situation is addressed, defining the District’s academic problems, academic performance will continue to decline.
No doubt there are dedicated teachers and staff in every school who put out a great amount of effort to educate students. However don’t confuse effort with results. Despite their best efforts the Clover Park School District continues to fail overall with many schools losing academic ground or remaining as perennial academic failures. The reason for this failure is not through lack of trying but rather systemic issues the District refuses to address.
Take for instance this week’s CPSD “beaming with pride” coverage of Dower Elementary School. The academic reality is something else. In the spring of 2023 students meeting State standards for English Language Arts (ELA) were only 34.9%; math 32.2% and science 36.2%. That’s an average of only 34.4% of students who met State standards in these three critical basic education subject areas. To put it another way: 65%+ of Dower Elementary students did not meet State standards in these three critical basic education subject areas. This data comes directly from the Office of Superintendent for Public Instruction (OSPI).
https://washingtonstatereportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/ReportCard/ViewSchoolOrDistrict/102234
Schooldigger is a source of academic trends going back to 2015 which are not provided by the annual OSPI “snapshot” year to year. Indeed OSPI deletes previous year academic performance from its website with no easy way to retrieve such data! I have to wonder why! Thus Schooldigger is invaluable in determining educational trends for CPSD and its schools. Schooldigger trends are based upon OSPI data.
https://www.schooldigger.com/go/WA/schools/0141000252/school.aspx
So where does Dower Elementary stack up against all elementary schools in the State? It is ranked 942nd out of a total of 1169 elementary schools: 19% which is to say 81% of the State’s elementary schools outperform Dower Elementary academically.
There is nothing in these statistics to take pride in. Indeed it is regrettable. Is there any wonder that when elementary students are this far behind in basic education in elementary school that their future in middle and high school becomes even more bleak?
All kinds of excuses can be made by CPSD apologists: blame race, ethnicity, family situation, economics, students, parents, etc. But in the end CPSD’s failure academically lies directly in the lap of Superintendent, Board and staff for an educational system that is designed to fail and fail it does. Until that changes, academic performance will not improve.