School Improvement Plan

Highlight 3-5 strengths of your school and how those strengths foster belonging, wellbeing and learning.

Personalized Learning

Gibson Ek students leverage their interests to pursue deep academic learning through engagement in projects and community partnerships that are meaningful to them and their communities. Working with their advisors, students build learning plans that include their post-high school visions, assessment of learning needs and goals, and current interests. They use design thinking to develop challenging and meaningful projects that demonstrate building and mastering competencies that are aligned with state learning standards.

Students’ abilities to personalize how they learn lead to meaningful community impacts. For example, one student’s interest in art moved from a personal art portfolio to creating the botanical sketches that now appear on the signs at the native plant gardens around the hatchery. This experience spawned a new love of botany, which led to collaborating with the City of Issaquah Parks department to conduct field surveys determining the density of native/invasive plants and scientifically cataloging the legacy of efforts to remove invasive plant species ten years ago. This student is now a college freshman planning to major in environmental studies.

Advisory Model

Gibson Ek’s robust advisory model centers skills and mindsets foundational to high quality, personalized learning including executive functioning skills, project planning and management, learning how to learn, and social and emotional learning. Students stay with their advisors for four years, ensuring at least one adult in the building knows them well. Multi-age advisories foster peer mentorship and community learning. The 2023 Healthy Youth Survey shows 95% of students feel safe at school and they were above the state average in their enjoyment of school, with 79% of seniors reporting they enjoy going to school. Eighty-five percent of students report feeling hopeful.

Community Partnerships

Gibson Ek continues to develop a strong internship program, adding an average of 20 new partners each year. Upon completion of an internship workshop that includes building a resume; learning how to reach out to potential mentors through email, phone and in person; practicing informational interviews; and learning about workplace expectations, students work with their advisors to secure internships in their interest areas. Working with professional mentors,

students learn the workings of the organization, complete projects that parallel their mentor’s professional work, and then design and complete projects that contribute to the organization. Experiences this year include:

• Two juniors interning with The Rhapsody Project, a youth-focused music nonprofit in the King Street Station arts cohort. They repair and maintain instruments, assist with marketing and events, and are developing their own culturally relevant music projects.
• Two sophomores are building tiny houses for Sound Foundations NW in SODO.
• Two seniors, two juniors and a sophomore form the first Issaquah Chamber of Commerce video team. The chamber president works with them to develop a series of promotional videos for area businesses.
• A freshman interested in acting and film is interning with Northwest Camera, a film studio and equipment rental facility in Fremont. She helps with local shoots and does some acting.
• A senior is archiving and digitizing documents, news stories and photos from Seattle's Black community in the early part of the 20th century for Seattle Griot, an organization working to establish the Washington State Black Legacy Institute. The digital archives will be used to enhance planned exhibits as well as video interviews with key community members.

Additionally, community experts come to campus to teach and provide feedback on student learning. During Design Labs professionals present students with real challenges and then provide feedback on the viability of their proposed solutions. Examples of Design Lab partnerships this past year include Trout Unlimited, Mary’s Place, Mountains to Sound Greenway, City of Issaquah’s Department of Sustainability and the Issaquah History Museum. Professionals also mentor students through independent projects and the senior Capstone.

These partnerships are essential in connecting students to authentic and meaningful learning experiences as they build their agency as contributors to and change makers in our community.

Describe 2-3 opportunities in the coming years your school can leverage for this school improvement plan and to address disproportionality?

Mastery Based Learning Grant

Through the Washington State Board of Education, we are part of the Mastery Based Learning Consortium. Our $100,000 grant will allow us to engage in the following efforts to improve mastery-based learning practices that are Culturally Responsive and Sustaining:

• Form a staff leadership team that engages in CRSE professional development and designs and shares practices with other staff
• Develop more robust Success Criteria for our competencies as well as a system for authentically integrating them into students’ project planning and formative assessment
• Identify more authentic and sustainable ways to integrate CRSE into every discipline, starting with science
• Form a staff PLC focused on examining student data to identify common UDL practices for all of our classes
• Support improvements in family outreach, including translating core materials

Tier 2 Team Development

Our Tier 2 Team is prioritizing the development of more sustainable resources and systems to increase student attendance and engagement.

Based on previous School Improvement Planning & Tiered Fidelity Inventories, describe 1-2 systems, structures or practices recently introduced or expanded that shows promise for student achievement and will be continued? What impact are you observing? What data are you using to monitor impact?

9^th Grade Onboarding

• All advisors meet with new families before school starts or during the first two weeks of school to welcome students and families and establish a clear point of contact
• All freshmen are assigned a peer mentor. Mentor and mentee meet twice a week for twenty minutes for the first half of the year and once a week for the second half. Mentors have discussion topics each week but may also respond to the needs of their mentee. They discuss a lot of the “how-to” of the learning model.
• All freshmen spend the first six weeks in an internship workshop designed to set them up for success in their first internship. In addition to practicing workplace skills, they begin to build a community cohort.
• All freshmen take a 101 Design Lab during the first quarter that is for freshmen only (all other labs are multi- age). Teachers directly teach and model the steps of design thinking as the framework for project-based learning.
• Freshmen meet as a cohort for two, 45-minute sessions each week for the first quarter. They learn “how-to Gibson Ek” in hands-on workshops for design thinking, developing a challenging and authentic learning plan, turning an idea into a project, and executive functioning skills for project management.

We are seeing positive metrics for freshmen because of the strong support they receive in addition to their time with their advisors.

• Regular attenders: 9% higher rate than other cohorts for the past two years
• Algebra 1 completion: 6% higher rate than other cohorts
• Retention: <5% of students transferring out of Gibson Ek at by end of first year

Algebra 1 Support

• A consistent team of three staff divide student support roles: instruction, tutoring, data monitoring and student/family outreach
• Tutoring support is available during students’ independent work time for those who needed more time to focus on math skills
• IXL program is integrated into struggling students’ math lessons to identify gaps and provide students with a alternate platform to learning math concepts. We'll expand the use of the tool this year.

We saw an increase this year in the rate of students who completed Algebra 1 at 90% mastery in their first attempt. This rate increased to 70% from 64%. Six of ten students in the BIPOC Focus Group met mastery in 23-24 compared with four of ten in 22-23.