Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosRedmond School District Superintendent Vickie Fleming, right, applauds as a Tom McCall Elementary School teacher tells a story during a Wednesday morning gathering. Now in her fourth year at the district, Fleming has made several changes, including backing the creation of the Redmond Proficiency Academy. Since the summer, she has also led the state’s effort in Race to the Top, a $4 billion federal school funding competition.
Rob Kerr / The Bulletin
Changing education in Redmond and beyond
From matching curriculum with state standards to going to a 4-day week, the changes have been frequent and wide-reaching, if not always universally popular. Now, Fleming is also leading the state’s Race to the Top efforts.
By Patrick Cliff / The Bulletin
Published: November 22. 2009 4:00AM PSTREDMOND — When former Gov. John Kitzhaber toured Redmond Proficiency Academy on Tuesday, Superintendent Vickie Fleming spent much of her time splitting off from the group to speak with students.
At one point, Fleming wandered to a student seated nearby.
The girl had an Amazon Kindle — a digital book reader — and Fleming wanted to see it.
“That’s cool,” Fleming said, after the student showed off the device. With a shy nod, Fleming added, “Thanks.”
Fleming often finds herself working between two worlds: of statewide policy and of the individual student. In her fourth year as Redmond’s superintendent, the constant in Fleming’s administration has been change. Recently, she was tapped to lead the state’s effort to win money in the Race to the Top, a $4 billion federal public school funding competition. The core of that work, she said, is reforming the state’s schools.
Fleming, 55, left behind her Oregon Department of Education career for Redmond. By the time she left, Fleming had risen to deputy superintendent of the state. The district hired Fleming to improve its schools in 2006, after she’d spent more than four years at the ODE.
It was, she said, a chance to see how state and federal policy issues played out in classrooms.
Recently, she’s been able to combine those worlds as she continued to visit classrooms and work with educators across the state on Race to the Top.
Between state and local levels, everything Fleming does is an effort to improve public education, former and current colleagues said. Taking the Redmond job was a way to get closer to the classroom, according to Pat Burk, a former ODE colleague and now an education professor at Portland State University.
“She wanted to get back closer to kids,” Burk said. “For Vickie, it’s all about kids and wanting to connect with teachers and kids.”
‘Outcome driven’
Since 2006, Fleming has consistently pursued her original charge. Fleming has made several controversial moves in Redmond. Those include shutting Edwin Brown Alternative School, adopting a four-day week and making certain that the district’s curriculum was tied to state standards.
The district’s state test results have improved during Fleming’s tenure. In the 2005-06 school year, the year before Fleming arrived, about 66 percent of the district’s students met or exceeded the language arts standards test. Last year, 79 percent did the same. In math, student performance improved about 3 percent over the same period.
All of the changes, Fleming said, are designed to improve schools, even if it means closing one. Because district teachers now teach to specific state standards, students have performed better, she said. Some schools, she noted, have also increased tutoring and after-school study programs.
“We have to be outcome-driven,” Fleming said during an evening interview in her office. “We can’t just sit back and assume it’s going to be OK. It isn’t.”
Fleming’s office is dominated by a conference table that could seat about 10 people. Her small desk sits in a corner, mostly hidden from view. A laptop, a slim lamp and a phone are the only items on her desk.
Often dressed in tailored suits, she may be more comfortable in cowboy boots. During a recent interview, the only subject that excited her as much as talking about students was speaking of the five generations of her family in Oregon.
The family still owns property near Monument, in Eastern Oregon, where ancestors’ graves date to the 1870s. The family, she said, has always been a hardy group.
“We’ll stand up to you and not bend too far over,” she said with a laugh.
Fleming grew up about 20 miles outside of Eugene on a 50-acre horse farm. After earning a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in speech therapy from Western Oregon University, Fleming spent about two decades working in schools as a speech therapist and administrator around the Willamette Valley before joining the state Education Department.
After spending almost five years at the state level, Fleming yearned for a return to the district level.
“I think what I really wanted to see was if all the ideas that get churned up (at the state level) could really work,” she said.
Redmond and Race to the Top
Now, Fleming has taken what she learned in Redmond back to the state level with Race to the Top. The state’s draft Race to the Top proposal includes several elements that Fleming has installed or backed in Redmond, including community schools — which tap community resources for things like tutoring and adult education — and proficiency-based education. In that way, Fleming has taken Redmond back to the state.
Fleming has seen some of it work in Redmond and hopes that community schools will spread and that more districts will use proficiency-based curriculum.
“It’s all possible,” she said.
People who have worked on the project — which involved more than 100 people and dozens of meetings — say Fleming’s leadership was critical to the plan. Dana Hepper, advocacy director for Stand for Children, a statewide public education advocacy group, is on the Race for the Top team with Fleming. Hepper was impressed with Fleming’s determination to improve schools.
“I think the main thing is her ability to be strong and driving, while being incredibly graceful at the same time,” Hepper said. “She’s not hampered by the way things have always been.”
Fleming spent much of her summer leading the state’s Race to the Top effort.
The state picked her to lead the work because of her connections across the state and her experience at local levels, according to state Superintendent Susan Castillo, for whom Fleming worked at ODE for about three years. Castillo said Fleming’s work in the Willamette Valley and Central Oregon gave her a perspective that few others have.
“I think it says a lot that we have somebody in that key position who understands all those issues,” Castillo said of Fleming’s ability to advocate for smaller, rural districts.
During her time at the state, Fleming also pushed for change, according to colleagues. Deputy Superintendent Ed Dennis said she pushed the state to change funding criteria for education service districts — sending more money to districts like High Desert ESD, which offered a particular specialty in technology. Previously, all ESDs received the same amount of state funding relative to size. Now, districts with specialties received more funding and the others less, Dennis said.
Because it had to do with money, the move was unpopular with some, Dennis said.
“She had the courage to put the money on the table,” Dennis said. “That’s a tough thing to do in the public sector.”
Adapting standards
Some describe Fleming’s changes as almost dizzying. Teachers in Redmond, for example, had to change the way they taught as they adapted to state standards. Then, teachers had to adjust again to teaching during a four-day week.
Barry Branaugh is president of the Redmond Education Association — a union representing teachers, librarians and counselors — and has spent hours negotiating some of those changes with Fleming.
“The only constant I’ve seen in this district over the last four years has been change,” Branaugh said. “We’ve had more change in the last four years in this district than I saw in the 15 before it.”
There have been days when Fleming, normally a confident person, wasn’t sure she’d hang on to her job. When Fleming, for example, decided to close Brown last year, she knew the move was risky.
She anticipated protests but was determined to move the alternative program. Today, she credits the Redmond School Board with supporting the move. It would have been easy, she said, for board members to retreat after several meetings during which dozens of students and parents begged to keep the school open.
But Fleming felt the school was letting students slide through, that it wasn’t challenging them enough. She continues to argue that students there deserved better from their district and said she was willing to lose her job for it.
“I recognized going in, that could be a career-ender for me,” Fleming said.
Now that state standards and the district’s curriculum are connected, Fleming continues to push for more reforms in the area.
The pinnacle of that work will come if the district adopts a standards-based report card, Fleming said. Though the district will likely keep a letter-grade card, Fleming believes a standards-based card would show students and parents exactly what a child did or didn’t learn.
So far, the Redmond Proficiency Academy, a charter school that opened in downtown this year, has taken the standards approach furthest.
At the academy, students are not on a typical class schedule. Instead, they must prove proficiency in a subject by meeting a set of state standards. Students meet those standards by various methods, including tests and presentations. If a student takes four weeks to show proficiency, great. Another student might take two years, and that would be acceptable.
The academy is more about teaching students specific things and less about being sure they graduate on time.
Fleming’s support was immediate, according to the academy’s Michael Bremont.
“She immediately said, ‘Let’s do it. We need that option,’” Bremont said.
Charter schools are sponsored by districts in which they are located, and Bremont was impressed that Fleming backed the academy, which he described as an implicit critique of the way public schools operate. The traditional school year, Bremont said, was called into question by the academy.
Bremont said Fleming’s support was critical to its opening this year.
“Very few would be willing to do that,” he said.
Money troubles
There have been trials, too. When the district faced a more than $6 million budget shortfall for the current biennium because of state budget cuts, Fleming struggled for an answer. The district ended up cutting more than 60 teaching positions and moving to a four-day week.
Though Fleming defends the new schedule, it took her weeks to get to that point, she said. She opposed the change until she saw a comparison showing that without a four-day week, the district would have to lay off still more teachers.
Recently, the revelation of a tax error hit Fleming hard.
The district undercharged its taxpayers by $900,000 in 2008, a mistake discussed during public budget meetings.
To pay for the mistake, the district levied a one-time charge of 30 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value. An average property owner in the Redmond School District has to pay an extra $50 this year, at the same time property owners have begun paying off the $110 million bond voters passed in 2008.
The district only recently made a major announcement about the error, which occurred in 2008. Though the district complied with state law by discussing the matter in public meetings, Fleming now says that wasn’t enough. She often trumpets the district’s openness as an effort to ease a lingering distrust by residents of school leaders. Beginning with the effort to pass the 2008 bond, district leaders have held dozens of public forums on issues — including Brown and the four-day week — in an effort, Fleming said, to be open with residents.
“It’s really challenging to build a level of trust to make the kind of district children deserve,” Fleming said.
In the tax case, the district failed to meet its own standards, she said.
“I feel badly about that,” she said. “I failed to recognize the need to make a public statement about it.”
Burk, the Portland State University education professor, said Fleming is as respected across the state as any educator. ODE, he said, mourned her loss when she moved to Redmond.
“She’s at the highest level of respect in the state. No question,” Burk said.
A run of change like Fleming’s often has a limited life, which is a reality she recognizes. How limited, though, is something she wouldn’t guess.
Right now, Fleming said, she is determined to make more changes. For instance, she hopes the district will adopt the standards-based report card. Fleming understands that despite not being an elected official, she can only last until the community tires of her changes.
“We’ll see what happens,” Fleming said. “The community needs to be supportive of what’s happening.”
Patrick Cliff can be reached at 541-633-2161 or at pcliff@bendbulletin.com.
ARTICLE ACCESS: This article is among those available to all readers. Many more articles are available only to E-Edition members. Sign up today!
blog comments powered by Disqus
