Companies give presentations at Snyder Junior High School

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  • Parents and teachers listened as Dr. Alan Wimberley (right) gave a presentation about how his company, Responsive Education Solutions of Lewisville, would be able to partner with Snyder ISD to help student performance at Snyder Junior High School.
    Parents and teachers listened as Dr. Alan Wimberley (right) gave a presentation about how his company, Responsive Education Solutions of Lewisville, would be able to partner with Snyder ISD to help student performance at Snyder Junior High School.
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Three education companies gave presentations in the Snyder Junior High School cafetorium Thursday evening about how they would work with Snyder ISD to reorganize and manage that school. 
About 80 parents and teachers were on hand to listen to the presentations and ask questions about the process and what it could mean for their children.
Although education companies Collegiate Edu-Nation and Hill Country Educational Leadership gave presentations at the meeting, only the final presentation of the evening — given by Dr. Alan Wimberley, chief education architect for Responsive Education Solutions (Responsive ED) — is a viable option for the school district to avoid a state takeover of Snyder Junior High School. 
“Out of the three presentations, for Snyder Junior High we have one option, because Responsive ED Solutions is the only one that meets the requirements,” Superintendent Dr. Eddie Bland said. “If the junior high stays open for grade levels sixth, seventh and eighth, the way it is, if we were going to keep it open through an innovative partner, then that innovative partner had to already be serving 10,000 students, have a ‘B’ rating and the majority of their campuses have a ‘B’ rating. Well, of our three applicants, we only had one of those, and that was Responsive ED.”
Wimberley said Responsive ED’s goal is to help Snyder students succeed.
“My goal tonight was to, number one, try to present things in a way that parents, community members and teachers would say, ‘This is not someone who comes in here and thinks he is better than we are and thinks that, well, he has all the answers,’” Wimberley said. “I wanted to present it in such a way that they know that we’re saying that Snyder educators will solve Snyder’s issues. What we are is a partner to come in that has had the opportunity to build out for the last 21 years a lot of ways to do that. So if we come and pull up alongside Snyder, it’s basically saying we’re unlocking the door and giving you access to so many resources that are now going to now be leveraged on your behalf here in the district.”
Wimberley acknowledged that parents are justifiably nervous about the future.
“Having the numbers of students we have on our campuses, we’re very, very experienced at showing up to meetings like this and talking to parents, but also talking to teachers,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, that teacher is the significant element in that equation that is going to make the difference in that child’s life. I tell teachers all the time, ‘If I don’t show up to work tomorrow, not a lot is going to change, but if you don’t show up for work tomorrow, a lot of lives are affected by that.’”
Wimberley said Responsive ED believes teachers are the key to student success.
“What we do is invest in them, and we invest in them in real, practical ways so they can invest in those kids,” he said. 
During his presentation, Wimberley told parents that Responsive ED has not always been able to help the schools they partner with. In particular, one campus — whose name he did not reveal — was already too low-performing to respond to Responsive’s ED’s methods. 
But Snyder Junior High School doesn’t compare with that school, he said. 
“Snyder doesn’t even come close to the problems that this community had,” he said. “This community had systemic problems that had been there for years. They were so far into it that we knew that, if we were not able to reach the learners earlier, we were not going to be able to make the differences we needed to make at the middle school level. I am saying that, because we are diverse — we have schools in the Valley that are almost all Hispanic, we have schools that are almost all African-American. We are so diverse in our populations, we feel like we can respond to whatever the population needs are here. I’m very confident in our people, and I’m very confident in Snyder teachers.”
Kim Alexander of Collegiate Edu-Nation and Amy Jacobs of Hill Country Educational Leadership each gave a shorter presentation. All three presenters said that while test scores are important, changing the culture of learning at the junior high school should be the main focus.
“We’ve got the same hammer over our heads that everybody else does. We do okay. We don’t knock the top out of multiple-choice testing,” said Alexander. “We do it just like everybody else and let the chips fall where they may, but our focus is on much more meaningful outcomes. You know, higher ed doesn’t even acknowledge things like end-of-course or STAAR. They acknowledge things like ACT. So we’ve got some issues to work through as a state, but we always have and we always will.”
Jacobs agreed that the state’s testing system has problems.
“The A-F system in the State of Texas it is not a consistent system, because what it does is, it takes your school and compares you to 30 schools that look very different from you,” she said. “Much of that score comes from it. A lot of the research that’s been done shows that school districts can only affect about 37 percent of the outcome of that test.”
Bland said there would be more public meetings before upcoming changes are put into effect, but said that those meetings have not been scheduled yet.