All district schools work to continuously improve and receive the right level of supports, whether they have many improvement needs or are trying to move from good to great. In addition, our goal is to evaluate what supports are working the best to help spread these best practices to all DPS schools.
When a school is identified for additional intensive support, we start with a third party review, known as an External School Review (ESR). This gives us a good idea of each school's strengths and challenge areas. We also look at individual schools’ own assessments to get a full picture of how we can be most helpful.
School leaders create improvement plans with support from their Instructional Superintendents, improvement planning partners and other experts. We also tailor our supports to the unique needs of each school to provide additional improvement planning support when applicable, to help a school with innovation planning and community-partnered school design.
We provide increasing intensity of support for higher needs schools to implement their improvement plans. This starts with providing customized network supports, including more resources, help from content experts, leadership development and coaching in ways to strengthen school culture.