Steady State Impact in the News
West Baton Rouge Schools awarded grant to bring CTE Academy to the west side
Mayeux said the school district plans to create a WBR Career and Technical Education (CTE) Academy with the reimagine grant funds.
The academy’s purpose is to prepare students to graduate ready for college, careers, and life.
“This is so our students in high school can have access to the same programs,” Mayeux said. “We want equitable access for them, and this has been a vision for a very long time. This has given us an opportunity to do that.”
Garrett Landry, the founder and CEO of Steady State Impact Strategies explained the grant process at the meeting.
Landry said the reimagine grant is different from other grants the state has put forward because the Reimagine is an outcomes-based grant. “There are two phases,” he said. “There's a planning phase, which we’re in now and then there will be an implementation phase upon completion of the planning phase, from the district perspective, approval from the board that is the direction that we want to go and then approval from LDOE that we have met the criteria and the deliverables in the planning phase, we would then move to implementation.”
We know it’s possible’ to achieve positive outcomes
Also, teacher-evaluation systems cannot be changed in a vacuum, said Garrett Landry, the founder and CEO of Steady State Impact Strategies, a consulting firm working with school districts in Texas to reform the way they identify—and reward—effective teachers.
Teachers have to have the right conditions for success, he said, and improving teacher quality has to start with ensuring principal quality. Landry said districts should anchor their teacher-evaluation systems in growth and delineate clear targets for teachers to meet.
“We don’t really have time [to waste] in education. … If we don’t get [students] on track early, it’s really hard to catch them up,” he said. “We really need the best and brightest educators, and too many systems can’t tell me who the best educators are. Everybody looks the same on paper.”
They work to ensure that every woman has same-day access to all methods of contraception, regardless of her ability to pay, and provide all with the same level of care and compassion, regardless of their circumstances.
It’s a reproductive-justice strategy that puts women in the driver’s seat of their own lives and bends the curve on devastating realities that define too many North Texas families — child poverty and teenagers’ repeat pregnancies.
Trust Her is geared toward all women, but it pays particular attention to teen access because they face the most barriers — they rarely have income, they have more difficulty advocating for themselves and sometimes their parents are resistant to contraception.
Loretta Landry, the former senior director at the Child Poverty Action Lab, designed and launched Trust Her in December 2019 after extensive research confirmed the link between long-term disparities in children’s lives and inequities in reproductive health.
Most affected by the gaps, Trust Her found, are low-income women of color.
Too often, Landry saw that almost no neighborhood clinics offered family planning services and pregnancy-intention questions weren’t part of the protocol. She heard repeatedly from women who felt stigmatized or coerced when the topic of contraception access came up.
The women behind the Trust Her initiative — invisible even to those whose lives they have changed — are modeling an audacious new approach to contraception in Dallas County.
In the 2017-18 school year, 62 percent of Dallas’s ACE schools earned an A or B grade from the Texas Education Agency’s annual rating. The participating ACE schools, which form their own feeder pattern, also earned more “distinctions” from the state than any Dallas Independent School District feeder pattern. (The state awards distinctions for achievement in subjects like math, reading and science.)
In 2018-19, the overall results have been equally impressive: Six of Dallas’s 11 ACE campuses earned a B, while one campus was awarded an A. Only one school earned below a C, and that was Elisha Pease Elementary School, which received a D.
…an educator focus group conducted by Best in Class and the Dallas district reported that school culture and community were the most important factors for teacher retention. Teachers were more concerned about the quality of their principals than their stipends. “The biggest challenge after schools leave ACE,” Garrett Landry of the Best in Class partnership observed, “is the consistency of leadership.
No one can deny the impact the ACE model is having on underperforming campuses, particularly ones with long records of leaving students behind and unprepared for what comes next.
Dallas ISD has community support from outside groups such as the Texas Hunger Initiative in the implementation of Breakfast in the Classroom. Loretta Landry of the Texas Hunger Initiative said studies have shown promising ways to increase student participation in school breakfast. She said since Breakfast in the Classroom is served to all students in a school, regardless of their economic status, it removes the stigma that can be attached to eating a free meal.
“Reducing the stigma means Breakfast in the Classroom can reach those students that may not usually eat school breakfast and may benefit most from the program,” Landry said.
Breakfast in a Classroom is part of a broader district strategy to make sure students are well fed throughout the day and year. There are 165 district schools participating in the After School Meal Program as of November; 107 schools participated in the program as of November 2014. Also, select schools serve hundreds of thousands of free summer meals.
“It’s easy for anyone who isn’t in danger of going hungry every single day to not fully understand how important these programs are to make sure Dallas ISD kids, at no cost to them or their families, are well fed,” Landry said.
Breakfast in the Classroom takes a bite out of student hunger
This two-year grant funds the pilot of the LeadRural Fellowship—a coordinated and intentional effort to identify, cultivate, and support rural leaders and to give those leaders the ideas, resources, network, and partners to be successful in designing and implementing new solutions in their communities.
LeadRural is the brainchild of Garrett Landry (Steady State Impact Strategies) and Brett Alessi (Empower Schools). Empower Schools has already seen promising early results in the rural space through the creation of the Rural Schools Innovation Zone (RSIZ), a partnership amongst three rural school districts and five higher education institutions, and regional workforce partners in South Texas. While retaining their unique identities, these smaller, rural districts can offer their students expanded access to college and career opportunities that no single district could offer on their own. In three years, the RSIZ has quadrupled the percentage of students completing a dual-credit course and nearly closed the gap with the state in the percentage of college-ready students. Now, Empower Schools and Steady State Impact look to build on their track record with the LeadRural Fellowship.