Oskaloosa School District Gains TLC Grant
Oskaloosa Community School Administration
Oskaloosa, Iowa – The Oskaloosa School District has been awarded a grant to help coach its teaching staff. This initiative started under Dr. Glass, who was the Director of the Iowa Department of Eduction.
The grant, given to one-third of the students in the state being accepted every year, is called the Teacher Leadership Compensation Grant (TLC). The Oskaloosa district will receive $750,000 in funding to help increase learning and achievement of the PK-12 students. This will be acomplished by developing more effective teachers during their teaching careers.
Oskaloosa Schools Superintendent Russ Reiter talked about the recent grant, and how it will impact the district and its students.
This would provide “leadership and role-models as to what is good teaching,” says Reiter. Reiter explained that, just like other districts, “building principles did not have the time to get into classrooms and work with teachers.”
The fact that principles have been further stretched in their duties, teacher coaching by their administrative staff has declined. “To find hours to get into the classroom was very, very difficult,” says Reiter.
The Oskaloosa School District applied for the grant last year, but was not successful in being chosen. This year, a combination of teachers, parents and staff worked together to prepare the grant.
The grant will need the district to have 25% of teacher involvement in leadership. Those leadership positions could be facilitators of professional leadership committees (PLC), vertical team members or district advisory team members.
8 positions will be instructional coaches. Those 8 positions will come from the current teacher staff. Those teachers with the experience to share with others the best ways to enhance learning, in order to instruct kids in the classrooms.
“So with instructional coaches or model teachers, they [Iowa Department of Education] believe this is really going to help,” says Reiter. “I think there is some great merit.”
The elementary building could see between 4 to 5 instructional coaches in reading and math. The middle school and high school should be seeing 2 instructional coaches per building. Those instructional coaches in the middle and high school will probably need to be well versed in technology in order to help make use of chrome books, which are slated to be deployed in the middle school and the 1 to 1 laptop program in the high school.
“The 750 thousand is welcome,” says Reiter. It’s going to make a difference. But Reiter expresses concern about the overall funding for the district.
“The first year you get the Teacher Leadership Compensation Grant, it’s monies that your going to receive, then the year after, once you get the grant, you now qualify and it’s rolled into our funding formula.”
This type of grant goes into a larger debate about categorical funding. So in other words, the pie of money that is given to the district from the state will come with more stipulations on how the money is spent. “I’m now being told, of this pie, 3/4 of that money, you’ve got to take and implement this reform and you can’t use it for anything else; and that’s frustrating,” says Reiter, who says that some reductions in staff may be necessary, “because efficiency wise, we’ve done just about everything we can.”
The categorical funding, like school start date, is an integral part of the discussion about local control of the school districts which is taking place right now in the Iowa Legislature.
