In 2012, morale at Fleming County Schools was at an all-time low. The district was a priority school receiving state assistance, had no real growth and was “about as low as you could get,” said Lesia Eldridge, the district’s chief academic officer.
“We were in denial for quite a while,” she said.
Fleming County, like every district, had a comprehensive plan, but “it was on the shelf and it was dusty,” Eldridge said.
Now, six years later, Fleming County is an accredited and distinguished district. Eldridge, Superintendent Brian Creasman, board Vice Chairman James Watkins and high school principal Stephanie Emmons detailed the district’s turnaround during a clinic session at KSBA’s Annual Conference earlier this month in Louisville.
Fleming County Superintendent Brian Creasman, left, talks with Livingston
County board member Ron Jones during KSBA's Annual Conference.
The district identified five areas of focus: engaging all students; developing a common curriculum with common assessments; analyzing data and student work through professional learning communities; empowering stakeholders through shared leadership; and connecting the systems.
“We had a lot of work to do,” Creasman said. “We said these are the five (areas) we’re really going to focus on because it covers all of those components of being a high-performing school district.”
Watkins said in March 2013, the district had $2,170 in the bank. Four years later, the district had $3.8 million.
Early on, the district had to cut back on teachers and staff, but the district found money to hire a curriculum specialist at the high school.
Fleming County also partnered with AdvancED, which gave the district some training. The district used AdvancED’s standards for quality as a road map for improvement.
“It was common goal, common vision, common purpose; it gave us a common language to speak,” Eldridge said. “We weren’t speaking the same language in all of our schools. … It was obviously a focus on teaching and learning. Everything that we did we realized has to connect teaching and learning. It has to connect to increasing student achievement. It gave us guiding questions, processes to go through. It gave us a direction for our schools. And it gave us all accountability. Every person in our district was accountable to the standards.”
(AdvancED did a case study on Fleming County Schools’ turnaround.)
Through districtwide training, the principals worked with teachers to understand the meaning of each standard. “Truly digging deep into those standards and understanding what they mean,” Eldridge said.
District officials received strategic planning training and transformed the district’s 30-page strategic plan into a one-page plan.
“The strategic plan is the North Star and the rest of the book is how you’re going to get there,” Emmons said. “We are always focused on student success (with) every decision we make.”
Emmons was a principal at another school in Fleming County before becoming the high school principal in 2015. She said administrators and staff decided to focus on organization, culture and communication to turnaround the school.
“We made those our three rocks,” Emmons said. “It also became the three rocks for Fleming County Schools. And so we were really able to hit the ground running and knowing that No. 1, you can’t do anything until you get things organized because it was a complete mess. No. 2, I had to do a culture (change). I was walking into a building – and I had taught there for two years prior to being a principal – of a toxic culture. A culture of failure.
“So really focusing on moving the culture of Fleming County High School and Fleming County Schools to being a district of distinction. And obviously communication. Putting systems in place to communicate out to staff.”
In the second year, the district added three more areas of focus: curriculum, empowerment and collaboration.
“Every class, K-12, that is offered in Fleming County Schools has a common curriculum, common assessments,” Emmons said. “Then we had to empower our stakeholders. We had to empower our teachers, empower our community and empower our students. Give students a voice. And that was another driving force. And collaboration. And this has been huge for our district.”
They allowed teachers to request a substitute so they could go to other district schools or classrooms for collaboration and to learn from their peers.
Every quarter, students take tests that mirror the state assessments. Administrators and teachers use the results to see where improvement is needed and to gauge how they will do on the KPREP testing. Creasman said the district knows in April pretty much what its test results will be when they are released in September.
“We had to decide what were our core beliefs and one big piece was continuous improvement,” Emmons said. “We will stop at nothing until we are the best, until we have that distinction.”
Fleming County officials said parent and community engagement is also a factor in students’ success.
“Priority status comes with a lot of negativity from your community, and we had to change that,” Emmons said. “That’s something we consistently have to battle because we’re moving toward a top-of-the line educational system and our community, we have to get them bought into that.”