Coming from Travis Elementary School, Amy Russell is taking on Bowie Middle School to get its ratings up in the state accountability system and unite the campus.
Bowie, along with Burnet Elementary, is a RISE campus.
The Rapidly Improving School Effectiveness program, or RISE for short, is an initiative geared to bolster academic performance through efforts beyond those regularly offered. With a focus on strategic staffing and student support, the RISE program identifies specific staff members who can best meet the individual needs of students at participating campuses, and then carries out a series of action steps to ensure that students’ academic, social, and emotional needs are met, the district website says.
Ector County ISD is one of several school districts in Texas to implement the RISE initiative. It is modeled after Dallas ISD’s Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program – which aims to provide students in high-needs schools with a proven platform for closing achievement and opportunity gaps, the website detailed.
Other districts that have implemented the ACE program have seen increased academic performance in core content areas, improved attendance, and a stronger parent-school connection, the site said.
Based on the state’s A-F accountability system, Russell said Bowie is projected to be a D campus.
“… We have one school year that we need to get to a high C or B …,” Russell said.
Superintendent Scott Muri’s message at the recent Leadership University was “level up” and go from good to great.
“Dr. Muri did brag on the progress, told us he was proud of the growth but we needed to get from good to great. That was a great message because I don’t know that our district has been completely good in several years. It was good to celebrate with my own campus that I came from. Travis is projected to get out of IR (improvement required),” Russell said.
She added that she is very excited about the work her teachers did.
“They gave everything. They left it all on the field that last year to have their students make great progress. We did that together as a team, so I know it can be done,” Russell said of her group at Travis.
At Bowie, she said there is a strong administrative team that is familiar with the changes that have been made the last couple of years and the RISE initiative.
The goal at Bowie was to get to a B campus, according to the campus improvement plan which Russell read the weekend of July 23.
“They talked very well about it, that it added positive culture to the building; it engaged students. It made connections between the teachers and the students to push the kids academically. … Bowie definitely had growth, but they didn’t have high enough growth with the right type of growth needed to be a C or B campus. So they’re projected to be on that border line …,” Russell said.
She added that she loves that Bowie went for a B or A grade. Russell said they celebrated the improvement and she and the team will celebrate it, as well.
“… But then we have to get the message, like Dr. Muri has laid out, to level up. … We have to level up kids and we have to move from good to great quickly,” Russell said.
The year before she got to Travis, Russell said the campus was an F school.
“… I knew that in my one year, which because of COVID became two and a half years, that I had to get them out of F up to at least a C. So two big leaps. It’s projected that they are C and they made that because the teachers were able to progress students about a year and a half worth of growth. If you grow a student one year, that’s not enough to get out of out of IR. You’ve got to grow students over here because of that COVID slump,” Russell said.
The district had two years of grace from accountability ratings, but they still needed data to show how things were going.
“… They still allowed you to look at numbers and data, so it still kind of hurt. But then there was grace that we’re not going to pound you with. But you still had to keep your timelines. You still had to report to TEA of what you were doing to get out of IR so those mechanisms never stopped. Even though we had grace. We still had a timeline, we still had to work an improvement plan. We still had to have oversight from our region centers, so even though there was grace, thankfully, you still had that positive pressure to not just sit there. But I will say it allowed me to strengthen relationships with the teachers so that when that second year of COVID came, we were able to withstand it because we were at a tight campus there at Travis,” Russell said.
She noted that there are still systems in place at Travis that go on even if she’s not there.
“The teachers there have great responsibility; great accountability. They are leaders, so the teachers will be ready to continue leading and growing kids at Travis. I feel very confident they’re going to be just fine. I do. I think that was one reason that released me easily to come help Bowie,” Russell said.
Russell worked at Ector Middle School for three years when the middle school system was implemented. There were 1,850 students at the time and a staff of more than 120.
“With middle school being new there, there was no playbook on how to set that up. I’m used to setting up systems; (I) definitely believe in distributive leadership where you surround yourself with your leads, your department chairs, with your APs (assistant principals). Then you empower them to do what they need to do and let them go and … lead the systems,” she said. “Once that’s under their roles and responsibilities, they take ownership of that and they run with it and just check back in. Then I just checked the system …,” Russell said.
At Bowie, Russell is supposed to have about 78 core teachers and she needs 10 more.
Expected enrollment is just about 1,000 students and every student will have a teacher.
Russell said she will not have substitutes.
“The district does allow us to have on campus what they call permanent subs where there will be someone assigned to us, so if there’s a teacher out sick for the day, that person just steps in. We are not starting with any subs, which is great,” she added.
Russell said being a principal was always her goal.
“… The first principalship I applied for was for middle school, which I didn’t get. However, I am thankful that I was sent to an intermediate 3 through 5 grade level, so I still had bigger kids and was able to be the head person and able to lead a school and lead them out of IR and establish good systems,” she added.
Systems are a big key for Russell with her accounting background.
“I was not the head principal in middle school, but I did see how … you have to establish those systems that work separately, but yet they work together. I was able to do that same model at the smaller campus. I didn’t have department chairs there, but I set up content leads and empowered them to lead their teams, so there was distributive leadership there on a smaller scale,” Russell said.
She added that the campus is beautiful.
“It’s a newer middle school campus. Everything’s clean and shiny. I do know a dozen or more staff members automatically from … previously being in the district at middle schools. … I know how they like things. I know how to work well with them. I know how to support them …,” Russell said.
She added that teachers reported July 25 instead of this week to start their planning and working as a team because Bowie is a RISE campus.
“They will have to learn the newer staff members, as well, that have come in since they left in the summer,” Russell said.
The campus has to move fast to grow and that’s why it’s all hands on deck and she’s seen the staff put in the effort already.
“They were coming back last week. They were excited to get in their rooms and were already asking the important questions of when is planning going to be. They weren’t asking the questions of how long is our lunch break? They were asking how they can make the school better quickly. So it seems every staff member that I’ve met that’s on the forefront of their mind, too, of we’ve got one year to get to a high C or B. That is the goal. It will be a goal of B or A, for sure,” Russell said.
The district will not accept anything less than a B or an A and neither should the community.
“… The talent’s here to do the work. The want to is here; the culture is positive. So what we need to do then is support our teachers so that they can do their best job when they’re standing in front of students. I was happy to see they have a VIPs chair. They have a PTA, so it seems like they have a good amount of parent engagement already,” Russell said.
Russell has spent most of her life in Odessa.
She went to Odessa College and University of Texas Permian Basin earning a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s in educational leadership from the institution.
She worked in accounting for 12 years. When her children were coming up to school age, she was able to quit her job and become a PTA mom, PTA president, Volunteers in Public Schools (VIPs) and VIPs chair.
“… I have my five-year pin that I’m very proud of. And then slowly under Joretha Lee I was able to start TAKS tutoring students. Then I volunteered all the time in classrooms. I went to school with my kids. I volunteered and then later when I was thinking about alt (alternative) certification, I subbed a whole year to see if I could do the job because it was hard. It looked hard. Teachers worked hard and and I didn’t know if I could do that. But I subbed a whole year under Sherry Palmer (the former longtime principal of Carver Early Education Center). Teachers kept encouraging me along the way to do that. So I subbed a whole year and then did alt certification and was hired the very next year into a fourth grade classroom,” Russell said.
Middle school is more challenging and students have more difficulty, but Russell said it appeals to her because she believes that age group needs more investment.
“They need more adults championing them and helping with their identity, helping them see what their pathway is before they move into high school where it’s almost kind of set so you can still influence; you can still show students this age they need to know their value. I think (the) middle years are probably the most difficult … so they need adults guiding them. They need counselors who care about them. They need administrators who are tough with them. My saying that I always say is I will hold you highly accountable, but I will defend you fiercely. So that’s always been my saying when I was in middle school before and I would even use that saying with my fifth and fourth graders there at Travis …,” Russell said.
“… When you need me to step in front of you for something, I’ll do it. But then the opposite side is I’ll hold you more accountable because you are capable; you have that potential,” she said.
She added that she learned that lesson when she first worked in middle school. The students need someone standing behind them, pushing them to do better, showing and telling them they can do it.
But they also need someone to hold them accountable and help them realize they will face consequences for a bad decision, for example. But at the same time, they need someone to tell them tomorrow is a new day.
Russell expressed gratitude to the assistant principals at Bowie.
“… They didn’t have a summer. The APs normally have time off, but they stayed with the school through the summer during this transition. They worked on hires. They set up this first week of PD (professional development). They stayed in contact with the teachers, so just huge kudos to the admin team that was here. That’s a big deal,” she added.
Executive Director of Leadership Cindy Retana said Russell is a proven campus leader who brings a wealth of experience with her to the Bowie community.
“She hit the ground running and has already united her faculty and staff and has put students at the forefront of all decisions and planning,” Retana said.
Russell and her husband, Jeff, have two grown boys and three granddaughters.
