School Improvement Plan

Highlight 3-5 strengths of your school and how those strengths foster belonging, wellbeing and learning.

School Culture and Connection: Liberty is a tight knit community where we work hard to foster inclusivity and connection. In the 2023 senior exit survey, 83.34% of students reported “feeling a sense of belonging to my school” while 84% of staff rated the leadership team’s ability to create a positive school culture as a 4 or 5 out of a possible five. One of the ways we work to develop this culture is through our professional development time. Every year has its own theme with this year’s theme being The Boys in the Boat. We kicked off the year by holding a “LID Olympics,” putting our teachers into teams of 8 person multi-departmental “crew” teams and having them compete in different activities. Throughout the year, these crew teams will come back together and will serve as PLC’s (professional learning communities) for those teachers as they engage in and reflect upon their work with Universal Design for Learning. Staff have been grouped this way in an intentional attempt at strengthening relationships and to build trust between staff members, while also encouraging collaborative practices.

In addition to building community amongst staff, we also intentionally organize our Advisory groups by grade level and alpha. This allows for students to remain together as an advisory cohort with their advisory teacher for all four years they are at Liberty. Similarly, we are continually looking for opportunities to use advisory and flex as a way to promote school culture/connection. This year, we are in the planning stages of running what we are calling “fun flex.” This will happen two times throughout the year (once each semester) where teachers will be encouraged to create a flex offering that provides a social, recreational, or interest-based experience for students. Some examples of what this might look like could be a reading room, a slime making class in science, a knitting room, a board games room, etc. In addition, a number of teachers have expressed interest and agreed to participate in the HS Advisory-SEL Pilot to learn and consider how to more effectively deliver SEL during advisory time.

Finally, we have a strong ASB program that helps promote school spirit through dress up days, spirit weeks, decorating, and other activities. Our Patriot Crew program for incoming 9^th graders has our upper classmen serve as mentors/leaders for incoming students. Patriot Crew activities happen not just during the orientation at the beginning of the year, but at other selected times such as PSAT day or at quarterly after school events to build relationships and connection to the school. These events have included things like a pre-winter break celebration (pizza, crafts, and movie), a Cookies and Cram session before finals in the fall, and a March after-school hang out and a pizza party to celebrate the end of their freshman year.

High quality instructional practices: Liberty has many highly skilled teachers. Our teachers collaborate regularly and are open to and willing to consider ways to improve their practice. This can be evidenced by their willingness to embrace principals of Universal Design, as well as their thoughtful work around alignment and grading practices. For example, this summer, we had four teachers as well as Principal Brownson volunteer to attend the district “Ignite” conference centered on Universal Design for Learning. This group along with a few other teachers make up our school’s Tier 1 team and are responsible for designing professional development for the entire staff around this topic. As a school we created a three-year plan to build our staff’s capacity to integrate principles of universal design into instruction on a daily basis. This plan is structured as follows: Each year we will choose three UDL checkpoints to learn about. For each checkpoint, members of our Ignite team will lead the staff through a training about that checkpoint and provide them with some strategies they can go and try in their classrooms. Following that training, teachers will be asked to attempt at least one of these strategies prior to the next meeting where they will reflect on how it went both individually, and then in a PLC group. They will repeat this process for each subsequent checkpoint throughout the year. The goal of all of this being that teachers will not only plan with UDL in mind, but that they will have multiple opportunities to reflect and learn collaboratively to expand and refine their practice.

Other initiatives we are doing to support this work include a clothesline in our staff room with different UDL strategies hanging on it that teachers can grab and try. We have also created a UDL shopping cart of strategies on Canvas for teachers. There is even a subset of teachers who have organically started their own book study for Katie Novak’s book “UDL Now!” These teachers will meet regularly to discuss what they read and consider how to apply that learning to their instructional practice. Finally, my administrative team is making an intentional effort to spotlight and celebrate when we observe elements of UDL in our evaluation conversations with teachers and use our evaluation conversations to push teachers to think about how they are meeting the needs of their diverse learners.

While we are excited about the opportunity to continue to improve our instructional practices to meet the diverse needs of our students through UDL, it is important to point out that the instructional program at Liberty is already quite strong. For example, in the 2023 LHS Senior Exit Survey, 72.53% of exiting seniors agreed or strongly agreed that they were “satisfied with the quality of instruction they received.” This can also be seen in our 2023 graduation numbers with 97% of students graduating on time as well as our 9^th grade on track metrics which showed 86% of all 9^th graders passed all of their classes. Another data point that speaks to this work is our AP scores. In 2023/24, our students took a total of 1,164 AP exams. Of those, 961 of them passed with a 3 or higher which works out to be an 82.5% pass rate (724 total exams, or 62% of all AP exams attempted, scored a four or a five!).

Extra-Curricular Opportunities and Participation: Liberty boasts strong participation in our athletics, activities, performing arts, and clubs. Last year in athletics alone we had 931 total participants across all three sports seasons. We have a strong group of coaches, teachers, and advisors who create a positive experience for our student athletes and participants. Student support at events is strong, as is that of our PTSA and Boosters, which also positively contributes to our overall school culture. Liberty, as well as the other comprehensive high schools, are expanding our athletic offerings to include girls flag football and badminton this year.

Describe 2-3 opportunities in the coming years your school can leverage for this school improvement plan and to address disproportionality?

We believe that building a teacher’s capacity to design instruction for a wide variety of learners is the key to improving the academic outcomes for our different gap groups. This coupled with expanding access to general education classes for our students in Special Education (of which our BIPOC gap group is overly represented) will help to decrease the disproportionality of outcomes they experience. We also believe that a uniform approach to addressing tardies will help to remove the possibility of bias, while also making sure we are not missing students who may need intervention or who may have been overlooked in past practice. We have a MTSS Tier 2 team that identifies students at risk or in need of additional support, who then pairs supports to those groups of students. Lastly, we are continuing to lean into the potential of technology to help support our MLL students as well as students who are hard of hearing. One example of this is encouraging the use of PowerPoint live to provide subtitles during instruction. These can be translated into almost any language to help students, especially our emerging MLL students, to better access instruction. All staff were asked to do this during their curriculum night presentations and will also be asked to do this at our incoming 9^th grade night as well to expand access to our families also.

Based on previous School Improvement Planning & Tiered Fidelity Inventories, describe 1-2 systems, structures or practices recently introduced or expanded that shows promise for student achievement and will be continued? What impact are you observing? What data are you using to monitor impact?

ouR Space: Last year we added the ouR space room which is a space for students who are unwilling to engage in class to reset and reengage. It is staffed with two trained behavior specialists who track student data, work to build student stamina, and ultimately work to get students into class more consistently. We learned a lot last year and continue to refine our systems. For instance, this year students must first attempt to attend class for 15 minutes before accessing ouR space. Our behavior specialists help to walk students to class, walk the halls to look for students eloping, and communicate with administration and case managers. The impact of this has helped to reduce the amount of students eloping from class and increase the regular attendance for some of our Tier 2 and 3 students.

Intensified algebra: Last year we saw a dramatic increase in the success rate in Algebra 1 (especially for our students in Special Education), largely as a result of the addition of the intensified algebra program (38% of SWD passing Algebra 1 with a C- or better in 2023 to 87% in 2024). This year, we are offering two sections of intensified and hoping that this will help to expand our ability to get our students with significant math gaps caught up with their grade level peers.