At one West Charlotte elementary school, students from various backgrounds enter its doors with odds overwhelmingly against them. Yet, one beacon of light with a recipe for success is helping students break down the notion of “benevolent oppression” and helping kids understand their potential in becoming high academic achievers.
Students at Allenbrook Elementary have a unique story in that they’ve been living in their shared pandemic their entire lives: poverty. For Principal Kimberly Vaught, supporting their academic journey is their best chance at changing the narrative.
“People called me crazy all the time. They said, ‘Mrs. Vaught you were having normal school even during the pandemic,'” she explains. “One of the things that I had said was while COVID certainly was a real pandemic, our kids have been in a pandemic of poverty their entire lives. While people have learned to survive in a different way, they could take lessons from the kids here in west Charlotte, because they are the biggest survivors ever.”
This year, it’s all about shifting the focus and learning from the students themselves about what normalcy really is. And despite the challenges that arose during the pandemic, Principal Vaught proved to the community that academic success is obtainable for every student, no matter their situation.
As a young girl, Vaught quickly understood her calling to become a teacher.
“As an itty bitty girl, I can remember making a declaration in 2nd grade that I was going to be a teacher,” she says.
Unlike others who may have stumbled across the profession and found it to be their passion, she always knew that’s what she wanted to do, and she would go on to center the process of searching for colleges as a young adult on those with reputable education programs, inevitably bringing her to the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
She earned her undergraduate degree in elementary education and a master’s in reading, a niche focus, but she saw its importance early on in her career.
“Even back in 1999 and 2000 when I was a 4th-grade teacher I saw the need for strong reading teachers and opportunities to lead in that vein,” she says. “And I knew coming to Charlotte-Mecklenburg that there were opportunities to be what they call a literacy facilitator, and I set my sights on that.”
After working several years as a literacy facilitator at a high-needs school and working closely with school leaders and administrators, she felt the tug to chase another opportunity. She would then return to the classroom as a student to earn her admin degree “to make a difference at a different level.” This marked the start of her journey to becoming a successful school turnaround principal.
“I took over the helm at Highland Renaissance Academy in the summer of 2012,” she explains. “The school had not made gains at all. In our district we have a growth model, so the school had not met growth metrics for years. I was able to go in that first year and turn that around and help the school meet growth, and soon we became a model Title I school in the district.”
After serving over two years there as the school turnaround principal, she was tapped by district leadership to open Lawrence Orr Elementary where she would be receiving students from three low-performing schools in the district.
“It was probably one of the best opportunities of a lifetime, next to being a wife and mom, being the founding principal at that school,” she says.
“The first year we moved the school from an F to a C, almost a B, and we held strong. And we moved the school not just from an F to a C, but we almost met metrics such as the number one growing elementary school in the district having come from the bottom. We moved the dial quickly.”
Despite where her students started academically at Lawrence Orr, she was able to raise the bar and bring the school up to one of the best performing schools in 2018-19 after earning a B, which according to her is a “huge” deal as a Title I school in North Carolina.
That experience inevitably led her to where she is now as she would be tapped yet again in 2020 to serve at the lowest-performing school in the district and one of the lowest-performing schools in the state: Allenbrook Elementary. The school was in the bottom 5% of nearly 2,6000 schools across the state.
“Coming in the school was below an F,” she says. “Growth indexes were some of the lowest in the state. They had not met proficiency or growth measures in six or seven years. They were looking at a state takeover. The superintendent at that time had to replace the principal, and CMS for years had district-level opportunities like strategic staffing to replace the principal and the admin teams. But Allenbrook was a little bit different in that this was a state-supported initiative for the lowest performing schools.”
When she entered the building around June of 2020 as kids were home for remote learning, she could tell the building was “honestly, just in a really bad situation” in several areas, such as academics, behavior, school culture, staff morale, and the list goes on. Yet, as the trend follows, she led the school in exceeding growth measures in every area during the 2020-21 school year.
After her second year there, the school was just four points away from the B mark, a remarkable achievement considering the school measured well below an F before she took the helm.
“We went from the bottom of the state’s low performing list to now being the number two most growing elementary school in the entire state,” she says. Our growth index for the 2021-22 school year was number two out of all elementary schools across the state of North Carolina. We’re pretty proud of that work in the midst of the pandemic.”
“Getting those quick wins early on really changed the game and it built the system of belief. Our kids and the community is on fire and we’re really proud of the work that they’re doing.”
A recipe for success
To be able to quickly shift a school’s trajectory in the way Principal Vaught does requires a well-thought-out plan, which she describes as “the three buckets”: time, talent and resources.
“Maximizing instructional time and looking at the amount of time we have with kids in the building and using that time,” she says, is crucial for ensuring each student’s needs are met. Next, she looks at other areas where time is allocated, such as how the schedule is structured, how they’re aligning human capital, which teachers are teaching which subjects, how instructional systems are being used, and their morning and exit procedures. Paying special attention to each of these elements is crucial to ensuring that their valuable time is used to its fullest.
In order to meet these high standards, she explains, requires a focus on talent.
I ascribe to a very strong coaching model,” she says. I know in some places coaching models have been frowned upon, but we really worked overtime to think about what it looks like so that teachers really feel the support. They don’t feel like someone’s just coming into their classroom to give feedback or to complete a checklist.”
“Everyone in our building has a coach at some level. I coach the instructional coaches and the instructional coaches coach the leaders as well as instructional support staff. Everyone is accountable to someone. It’s not just telling someone what to do, but we do everything from assist with lesson plans to leading PLCs to model lessons in classrooms and pulling small groups.”
In her words, coaching is all about being bedside with students and teachers, not just to give them real-time feedback but to serve as strong models.
And finally, she focuses heavily on how the school manages its resources.
“We really had to be creative about how we leveraged our Title I dollars, how we leveraged our local funds, how we leveraged our restart funds to make sure that were, number one, making decisions in the best interest of our students and looking at the capacity of the teachers and the support staff that we’re working with.”
One way they’re doing this is by setting their sights on professional development and motivating their staff and students in order to set high standards for themselves.
“We talked about active student engagement versus compliance and really getting teachers, not just to have them see it but to have them motivated,” Vaught says. “Every K-5 teachers as well as certified support staff was able to take a trip down to Ron Clark Academy to a spot where we know kids at Allenbrook are going to dance on the table, but to give them something to reach for to have them see some of the very best in the field.”
She would also tell you that she’s very keen on building a sense of belief and urgency in the school around the work that they do and ensuring that its vision is made clear.
“We’re thinking about not just outcomes for our kids, but for our community, our city, our state and really our nation. Having those conversations about systemic structures that have snatched the people groups that we serve here in west Charlotte.”
Those conversations, she adds, are crucial for changing the school culture from the inside and out.
“I know different people have different philosophies, but really working on building a strong instructional core as a way to fix a lot of the cultural divides that plagued our school for so very long,” she says. “I believe that when you raise the bar for kids, when you give them something to reach for and when you give them the structures, the staff and the support to get there, it gives them the adrenaline. They want to do it again and again.”
Setting priorities
As mentioned previously, Vaught sees the importance in understanding her students’ backgrounds, and that while the COVID-19 pandemic may have come to an end, the everyday turmoil and struggles that act as boundaries in their lives persist.
“They didn’t really have to shift and adjust,” she says. “They weren’t accustomed to going on vacation or going to uptown Charlotte for dinner. Thinking about our middle-class norms and values and how we put those on some of our kids here, they have taught us lessons about what normalcy really is.”
This year, her focus remains on ensuring that each student views themselves as powerful learners capable of achieving great things later on in life.
“Our focus in particular this year is making sure that now that our kids have had an opportunity to be successful, they taste it and bridge that with real-world opportunities. That they see the connection between their academic outcomes and life-long outcomes. We know as adults in the building what it means when you’re in 5th grade and you go to 6th grade and you’re able to enroll in honors classes. We want for our kids to know that we believe every single one of them will and should go to college, because for them education is the only way out. They don’t have sponsors. They won’t have inheritances. They won’t be the beneficiary of some big insurance policy.”
So as Allenbrook enters its next semester of school, her mission for the school continues: support these students in breaking down their barriers.
“For me it really is just a matter of knowing that this isn’t a sprint it’s a marathon in helping them to ground themselves and root themselves in their why,” she explains. “They already have grit. They’re brilliant. But to really hold on when the turmoil continues, for them the pandemic isn’t going away. It’s not COVID it’s poverty. It’s about how they overcome that pandemic in their own lives and building systems that work for them because the systems that have been built historically are not built for them. I want them to understand how to demolish those systems and build their own.”
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